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I

N A RELATIVELY RECENT ARTICLE appearing in
The Thomist Father John Quinn contends that the Third
Way's first part, the part in which Saint Thomas concludes
to the existence of a necessary being (beings?) in order to
explain the existence now of anything rather than nothing, is
basically sound. 1 Arguing that particular, univocal agents,
each one itself corruptible, cannot in and by themselves account
for either substantial change or the on-going cycle of generation
and corruption-and, thanks to the latter, the quasi-perpetuity
of natural species-Quinn thinks the Third Way is thus able to
infer the existence of a universal physical cause of change, one
which, evidently, must be a necessary being. He maintains,
furthermore, that without such a universal generator (nowhere
empirically identifiable, he admits) the universe of things
possible not to be (" physical possibles ") would fall to
naught, or be annihilated. Finally, he apparently views this
defense of the Third Way as successfully meeting the objection,
frequently raised nowdays, that its reasoning, "if each thing
possible not to be at some time is not, and if all things are
possible not to be, at one time in the pa.st nothing existed,"
commits the compos:ition fallacy (or, in terms of modern formal
logic, involves an illicit quantifier shift) .2 Quinn, obviously,

1 John M. Quinn, O.S.A., "The Third Way to God: A New Approach,"
The
Thomist 42 (1978), 50-68.
•Indeed much of the recent literature on the Third Way has dealt almost
See, for
exclusively with the question of its supposed composition fallacy.
example, the following: Rem B. Edwards, "Composition and the Cosmological
Argument," Mind, LXXVII (1968), 115-17; ibid., "The Validity of Aquinas'
Third Way," The New Scholasticism, XLV (1971), 117-26; and Thomas Mautner,
"Aquinas's Third Way," American Philosophical Quarterly, 6 , (1969), 800-01.
However, as I will show later above (and in a way that has not been done before),
the composition fallacy charge is logically ill-founded.

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finds nothing wrong with this piece of reasoning, since, again,
according to him, without a universal physical cause (also a
necessary being) there would be no substantial change, consequently no generation of new substances and thus an eventual
" collapse into nothingness."
Since, in my view, Quinn's article, unfortunately, contains
several major errors, some of physical philosophy, others of
metaphysics, it warrants a reply. However, rather than confine
the discussion of this paper to such a narrow, polemical purpose,
I should like instead to locate my criticisms of Quinn's defense
of the Third Way within a somewhat broader context, namely,
one in which I consider the more general and fundamental
question of the argument's overall soundness. As Quinn correctly sees, much of the Third Way's difficulty lies not with the
composition fallacy charge to which one of its inferences is
exposed (and which, I will show, it can successfully meet) but
with its presumed capacity to justify its first part's conclusionthe existence of some necessary being. Central to this endeavor
is the reasoning I have placed in quotation marks above; for it
is here not only that the alleged composition fallacy supposedly
occurs but also that we are faced with a very dubious premise,
one that has proved particularly troublesome for most commentators on the Third Way to justify. While I will accept the
truth of this premise and also the subsequent reasoning of the
Third Way's first part, I will nonetheless argue (I) that its
inference to the existence of a necessary being lacks the conclusive support of sound physical philosophy and (2) that
what the Third Way's first part succeeds in establishing is only
the existence of s01nething necessary, something which need
not, however, be identified with an incorruptible substance
whether spiritual M material.
There are, moreover, certain difficulties with the Third Way's
oft-neglected second part, the part in which Saint Thomas
concludes to the existence of an uncaused necessary being
whom he then confidently calls God. While these difficulties
are largely of a hermeneutic nature, they can hardly be
ignored in any discussion seeking to appraise the Third Way's

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overall soundness. There is, in this connection, the infinite
series objection which Saint Thomas thought it appropriate to
consider in the final section of the argument yet actually need
not have bothered with in the case of the cause of necessary
beings. There are also the following two questions which this
part of the argument fails to raise explicitly but whose answers
are nevertheless quite important to the argument's completeness: (1) In what precise sense can a necessary being be said to
have its necessi,ty caused? and (2) Why must there be only one
uncaused necessary being (as its conclusion so clearly implies)?
In my treatment of these questions later on in this paper, I will
indicate how their answers serve to bring out the key role played
in this argument by a doctrine central to Saint Thomas's metaphysics but which, most likely because of its presumed familiarity, is only implicitly at work in the Third Way's second
part. Perhaps this last remark may help explain why many
recent commentators on the Third Way have tended to neglect
this very important feature of the argument from " the possible
and the necessary" to focus instead almost exclusively upon
its first part. 3 In sharp contrast, my paper will, in its last
main section, present a reconstruction of the tertia via in which
this doctrine figures prominently.
Accordingly, in what follows I propose to discuss the following
topics: I. A Dubious Premise (and the alleged composition
fallacy); IL The Failure of the Third Way's First Part; III.
The Third Way's Second Part; and IV. A Reconstruction of
the Third Way.

•See, for example, C. G. Prado, "The Third Way Revisited," The New
Scholasticism, XLV (1971), 495-501, and Thomas P. M. Solon, "Some Logical
Issues in Aquinas's Tertia Via," Proceedings of The American Catholic Philosophical Association, XLVI
78-83. Both these writers seem to think
that the nerve of the Third Way's argument is to be found in its first part and
that its principal conclusion is to the existence of an ultimate cause of change
(in Solon's case, an ultimate efficient cause, and, in Prado's, an ultimate final cause).

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I
A Dubious Premise
1. The alleged composition fallacy.

In an argument of the
Third Way's first part we find the following inference;
A. (1) What is possible not to be at some time is not. 4
if all things are possible not to be, at some time
nothing existed. 5
• For a good discussion of the controversy waged among certain modern
scholastics about the truth of this proposition see Thomas Kevin Connolly, "The
Basis for the Third Proof of the Existence of God," The Thomist, XVII (1954) ,
If for no other reason, Connolly's article merits attention for revealing
how most, if indeed not all, of the major objections lodged against the Third Way
ii.. Anthony Kenny's The Five Ways (New York: Schocken Books, 1969) have
already been raised and answered during the course of this controversy.
One
further point by way .of caution. As Connolly's article textually shows, when
Saint Thomas speal<s in the Third Way of being "possible not to be," he is not
referring to being whose non-existence is conceivable (since even God, according
to Aquinas, would fall under that category). Nor, correspondingly, by a" necessary
being" does he mean one whose existence cannot be denied without contradiction (i. e. a "logically necessary " being, to use the description of certain
contemporary Analytic philosophers).
By "being possible not to be" he is
clearly referring to beings whose essences contain the potency of matter and
which are also subject to substantial change; and by " necessary being '" he
means one which cannot cease to exist (assuming it erists) or else (as in the
case of a being whose necessity in being is of itself) the self-existing being.
However, this point has already been well argued in Patterson Brown's " St.
Thomas' Doctrine of Necessary Being," The Philosophical Review, LXXXIII
(1964), 76-90, and I merely call attention to it here to inform the reader of what
meanings of " possible not to be " and " necessary being" will be operative in
this paper.
5 This
argument, which I have designated "A," appears in the following
context in the Latin text of the Leonine editi0n: " Invenimus enim in rebus
quaedam quae sunt possibilia esse et non esse, cum quaedam inveniantur generari
et corrumpi et per consequens possibilia esse et non esse. Impossibile est autem
omnia quae sunt talia semper esse, quia quod possibile est non esse quandoque
non est. Si igitur omnia sunt possibilia non esse aliquando nihil fuit in rebus."
However, the line which reads " Impossibile est autem onmia quae sunt talia
semper esse" would seem to be a less preferable rendering than the variant
reading "Impossible est autem omnia quae sunt, talia esse" not only because
the latter accords more with the Maimonidean exemplar but also because it
avoids the ambiguity of the statement "it is impossible that all such beings always
exist," since that statement could imply that it is possible for some such beings
always to exist-something which Saint Thomas would wish to deny.

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Today it is widely thought that A contains a composition fallacy,
or, in terms of modern formal logic, "an unacceptable interchange in the scope of the universal and existential quantifiers." 6
Those who make this charge evidently do so because they think
that the inference from A (1) to A (2) entails the following
argument:
B. (1) Each thing possible not to be at some time is not
(2) Therefore, all things possible not to be at some time are
not (missing premise)
(3) Consequently, if all things are possible not to be, at
some time in the past nothing existed. 7

In other words they think that Aquinas must have used another
premise in his move from A (1) to A (2) and they supply B (2)
as the logical candidate. While Saint Thomas, I would agree,
does omit certain premises in his move from A (1) to A (2),
B (2) cannot possibly be one of them. He could not have
reasoned B (1)-B (2), not because he would have seen this
inference to be fallacious (although I think this too is true),
but basically because he was philosophically prepared to allow
that beings possible not to be could, as a class, continue in
existence indefinitely provided that not all beings are possible
not to be. In this respect, he would be simply following Aris6 Thomas P. M. Solon, op. cit. 80.
To put this quotation in its proper context
allow me to quote the argument in which it appears: " In fact, from the
standpoint of the predicate calculus, Aquinas's argument may be shown to involve
an illicit reversal of quantifiers. He coiri;ends that: 5. Each p•ossible being at
some time is not. 6. Thus there is a time when al,l possible beings are not. The
general quantificational pattern of this particular inference is 5. (x) (Ey) Ryx. 6 .
.'. (Ey) (x) Ryx. Between 5 and 6 there occurs an unacceptable interchange in the
scope of the universal and existential quantifiers and, consequently, such reasoning
is invalid." (My italics.)
7 See that portion
of Solon's argument that I have placed in italics above.
Some other examples of this very same interpretation of A are to be found
in: Alvin Plantinga, God, Freedom and Evil (New York: Harper Torchbooks,
1974), p. 80 and Anthony Kenny, op. cit., p. 56. It is truly remarkable that so
many recent writers on this subject who could, not immodestly, admit to a
certain logical expertise have understood A to entail B. As far as I can
determine the earliest suggestion of this charge, at least in modern times, is to be
found in Paul Geny, S. J., in his article "Les preuves thomiste de !'existence de
Dieu," Revue de Philosophie, XXXI (1924), 586-588.

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THEODORE KONDOLEON

totle, who, as is well known, maintained the eternity 0£ the world
and the perpetual existence (as a class) of corruptible things.
While Saint Thomas did not share Aristotle's assumption regarding the eternity of the world, he would still acknowledge
that God could have created such a world and that in that
world, assuming it is just like the actual world in other respects,
beings possible not to be would, as a class, always exist even
though each one 0£ them must necessarily, at some time or other,
corrupt.• Moreover, as I have said, he would certainly insist,
regarding the actual world, that such beings could, as a class,
continue in existence forever (provided that some necessary
being, or beings, existed) . Accordingly to B, however, the
truth 0£ B (2) is supposed to follow logically (or necessarily)
from the truth 0£ B (1).
What is more, according to B's version of A, B (2) should read
All things possible not to be at some time in the past
are not.

B (2')

if we are to make any sense out of A (3), the consequent of
which asserts "at some time (in the past) nothing was in
existence." Yet, as is abundantly clear from the data he selects
from which to argue the Third Way, Saint Thomas admits the
existence, even now, 0£ beings possible not to be. Thus, it is a
mistake to think that in A Saint Thomas was actually arguing
B. Rather, his argument here, in standard form, is the following:
C. (1) If each thing possible not to be at some time is not and
if all things are possible not to be, then at some time in
the past nothing existed
(2) Each thing possible not to be at some time is not
8 An argument may resemble in form a composition fallacy but, materially, may
not be one. For example: (1) Each part of the house has been painted white;
(2) therefore, the whole house has been painted white. This is a perfectly valid
inference. For a composition fallacy to occur, then, the attribution to the whole
of a property belonging to each of the parts would have to ignore a qualitative
(or quantitative) difference existing between the whole and its parts when it
comes to possessing, or not possessing, a property belonging to each of the parts.

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(3) Therefore, if all things are possible not to be, at some
time in the past nothing existed. 9

That there is nothing in this argument that logically entails B
should now be obvious.
Perhaps the following argument by analogy will serve to
confirm the correctness of my view. Let us assume that each
woman at some time ceases to exist (something evidently true)
and argue:
D. (1) Each woman at some time ceases to exist
(2) Therefore, all women (as a class) at some time cease to
exist.

Dis clearly a case of the composition fallacy. But let us introduce into D's argument the following premise (by assumption)
all human males (as a class) at some time cease to exist. Then
we could argue, validly and soundly;
E. (1) If all human males at some time cease to exist and each
woman at some time ceases to exist, then there would be a
time when, by then, all women would have ceased to exist
(2) There is a time when all human males cease to exist
(3) Therefore, if each woman at some time ceases to exist,
there is a time when, by then, all women would have
ceased to exist.

E does not commit a composition fallacy even though E (3),
taken isolatedly, would seem to commit such a fallacy. E does
not commit this fallacy because E is obviously a sound argument: for if there are no human males, there can be no human
reproduction (we may exclude here parthenogenesis, miracles,
and cloning) and thus no new human females to replace those
who have already perished. 10 So too, A's argument proceeds
011 the assumption that all things are possible not to be and
• The argument in form is validated as follows:
1. (q.
8
q
(p
s)
Exportation, 1.
3. q
4. p
s.
Hypothetical Syllogism, 3, 4.
10 One may want to keep this example in mind when it comes to the question
of justifying 0 (I) above.

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draws the inference that at one time in the past nothing existed
(assuming, also, that each thing possible not to be at some time
is not) .
I believe I have now sufficiently established that A, when
properly understood, does not ·entail a composition fallacy. We
have now to determine whether C (A's argument expressed
non-enthymematically) is a sound argument (I have already
established, in a footnote, the somewhat trivial point of its
validity). We may safely assume C (2) to be true in light of
arguments presented elsewhere. 11 What remains, then, is to
decide whether C (1) is true. As in the case of C (2) Saint
Thomas offers no proof here (or anywhere else to my knowledge) of its truth. Consequently, defenders of the Third Way
have been left with the task of explaining why he thought it to
be true or, even more to the point, of actually justifying it.
Before presenting my own defense of C (1) , let us call it the
"dubious premise" (actually it entails an inference), I would
like to review for the reader what certain other past and recent
commentators on the Third Way have had to say in its (i.e. C
(1) 's) behalf since I believe that most of them have in one way
or another misunderstood it.
9!. Unacceptable views of the" dubious premise." According

to one view, that proposed by Gilson-Copleston, C (1) 's
truth can be established by means of the following explanation. 12
(1) Assume, as the argument of the Third Way does assume,
11 See Connolly, op cit.
In this discussion the chief argument to support the
premise what can not-be at some time is not is the following: What exists forever
must have the capacity to exist forever. Hence, if a corruptible did not
at some time corrupt bnt continued to exist forever, this could only be because
it has the power to do so, in which case, however, it would simultaneously possess
both the power to exist forever and the potency not to exist forever-an implicit
contradiction.
This argument is also found in Aristotle's De Coelo, I, 12,

12 See Etienne Gilson, The Christian Philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas, trans.
by L. K. Shook (New York: Random House, 1956), pp. 69-70; and F. C. Copleston,
Aquinas (Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1955), p. 120. I have placed Gil.son's name
first in their hyphenated names above since I believe that Copleston is merely
following Gilson here.

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that past time is infinite. 18 (2) Assume, also that everything
possible must, given an infinite time, be realized (even realized,
apparently, in an infinite past time). One may then argue:
F. (1) If each thing is possible not to be, all things, collectively,
are possible not to be
(2) In an infinite past everything possible must be realized
(assumption (2) above)
(3) Past time is infinite (assumption (1) above)
(4) Therefore, if all things are possible not to be, at some
time in the past nothing existed.

I find a number of difficulties with F's defense of C (1) .
(1) It renders one of the premises of Saint Thomas's argument,
namely, C (2), actually superfluous and thus would not seem
to accord with Saint Thomas's own view of the argument. 14 (2)
F (1) possibly commits a composition fallacy. 15 (3) Granted
that everything possible (or possible to a species) must be
realized in the course of an infinite time, there is no reason to
suppose that everything possible (to a species) must be realized
in an infinite pa.s-t time. 16 ( 4) Finally, it is certainly not obvious
18 As Saint
Thomas observes in Summa oontra Gentues, Book I, Ch. 13,
after presenting the Aristotelian argument from motion for the existence of God:
" The most efficacious way to prove that God exists is on the supposition that the
world is eternal. Granted this suppositi-0n, that God exists is less manifest. For,
if the world and motion have a first beginning, some cause must be clearly
posited to account for this origin of the world and motion." On the Truth of the
Catholic Faith, trans. by Anton C. Pegis et al. (New York: Han-0ver House,
1955) pp. 94-95.
14 Actually,
this premise, "whd is possible not to be at some time is not,"
does not appear in Maimonides's statement of the argument, the exemplar of
Saint Thomas's Third Way· Thus Gilson's interpretaLion of C (1) ab-0ve would
seem to be based upon a close following of Maimonides's argument. See Moses
Maimonides, The GuU:le of the Perplexed, trans. by Shlomo Pines (Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 1963), II, 1, Sa (pp. 247-48).
15 On this
point see David A. Conway, "Possibility and Infinite Time: A
Logical Paradox in St. Thomas's Third Way," International Philosophical Quarterly,
XIV (1974), 201-02. See also Alvin Plar.tinga, God and Other Minds (New York:
Cornell University Press, 1967) pp. 14-15. However, Plantinga is willing to
allow that such an inference may still be (materially) sound.
16 Gilson apparently
agrees with Maimonides's version of the argument and holds,
with him, that everything possible for a species must be realiz·ed in an infinite time.
See Gilson, op. eit., p. 69. Furthermore, he argues "where there is infinite

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that everything possible, or possible to a species, must be
realized in the course of an infinite time. For example, assuming
the human species to be eternal (as Aristotle erroneously
thought) it is by no means clear that, at some time in the
course of infinite time, man must perform a certain type of
morally evil act, even though such an act would, in fact, be
possible for him. Moreover, what is possible to a species in one
possible world (e. g. a certain size or number) may not be
possible to it in another. Hence not everything absolutely
possible (to a species) need be realized given an infinite time.
I think we have shown good cause for dismissing the GilsonCopleston version of C (1) either as the latter's acceptable
defense or as a likely explanation of how Saint Thomas himself
would have gone about justifying it.
Others have proposed explanations of C (I) closer to what I
believe Saint Thomas really had in mind when he asserted it
to be true. C. G. Prado, for one, has argued that this proposition is indeed true given the context of Aristotle's physics.i 7
Within that context, Prado reminds us, the existence of necessary beings (the heavens, their unmoved "movers") is absolutely required to explain the continuing cycle of generation
and corruption in our terrestial realm. Consequently, he points
out, without such beings this cycle would, on the Aristotelian
theory, come to an end and, with its cessation, a static universe
would ensue (one that would be likened today to a cosmic
state of entropy) , a situation supposedly tantamount, for an
Aristotelian, to a state of nothingness. 18 With this cosmology
duration, it is unthinkable that a possible worthy of the name be not realized."
Aside from begging the question, this comment does not inform us why everything
possible (to a species) must be realized in an infinite pm1t time, presumably what
the Third Way is arguing.
17 See C. G. Prado, "The Third Way Revisited,"
The New Scholasticism, XLV
(1971), 495-501.
18 To quote Prado completely on this point:
" What we seem to have, th.en,
is the contention that if all things are corruptible, a time will come when
they all hav.e corrrupted ... Our first cine is our impulse to say that even if all
things did corrupt, there would still be something: the matter or stuff to which
they corrupt. But a little reflection will show that if corruption is inevitable,

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in mind Saint Thomas could have justified C (1) by the following argument: if each thing possible not to be at some time is
not (and if all things are possible not to be) , there would come
a time in the (infinite) past when, by then, all changes would
have ceased and a static universe would result-in other words,
a universe equivalent to a state of nothingness.
Yet despite a certain degree of plausibility, Prado's account
of our dubious premise cannot possibly be correct, basically for
the following two reasons. (1) Saint Thomas would not have
equated a universe in which substantial changes no longer take
place to a state of nothingness. Indeed, according to him, at
the "end of the world" the movements of the heavens will
cease and, with their cessation, substantial changes also.19
Nonetheless, the universe, in a renewed form, namely, one of
immutability, will continue in existence forever. 20 Hence,
Saint Thomas would be most unwilling to accept the view Prado
wants to attribute to him here in the Third Way, namely that a
static universe (or, more precisely, a biologically lifeless one)
should therefore be understood as a non-existing one. (2) When
Saint Thomas asserts in C (1), "if all things (omnia) are possible not to be ... then at some time in the past nothing excumulative, and irreversible, such an end product would be a universe not in proceas, i. e. a wholly static universe. Now this is in fact a notion as incoherent to us
as it would have been to Aristotle and Aquinas .... In any case, the suggestion is
that for Aristotle or Aquinas there is no difference between saying on the one
hand that all things cease to exist and on the other 'that process ceases." Page 500.
19 See Saint Thomas Aquinas, On the Power of God, trans. by Lawrence Shapcote,
0. P. (Westminister, Md.: The Newman Press, 1952). According to Saint
Thomas's teaching here (in Question 5); 1) The heavens will cease to be in
motion when the number of the elect is complete (Q. 5, a. 5); fl) The elements
will cease to be corrupted and remain in substance when the external cause of
their corruption ceases, which cause must be reduced to the heavenly movement
(Q. 5, a. 7); 3) When the heavenly movement ceases, in this lower world the
action whereby the " medium " is illumined and affected by sensible things will
continue but not the action whereby matter is transformed and which results in
generation and corruption (Q. 5, a. 8); and 4) In the renewal of the world no
mixed bodies will remain except the human body (Q. 5, a. 9).
00 See ibid., Q. 5, a. 4 and a. 7, ad 17.
See also Sumnia Theologiae, I, Q. 104,
a. 4.

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THEODORE KONDOLEON

isted," his words should be taken at face value. 21 That is, the
word " omnia" should be taken to include even matter (prime
matter) and the words " nihil fuit in 1·ebus" to mean just that,
viz., absolute non-being. When understood literally, then,
Saint Thomas can only be arguing that if all things (including
matter) are possible not to be, at some time in the past nothing
(no being) existed. Prado, however, apparently sees matter as
something outside the scope of " omnia" in the premise (or
inference) under discussion. Now while Saint Thomas did
think that matter was, in the physical sense, not something
possible-not-to-be, it should not be concluded on that account
that he did not intend to include it within the scope of " omnia "
when he supposed, for the sake of the argument, that all things
are possible not to be and had still to establish, by a reductio ad
absurdum, the existence of something necessary. 1\-foreover,
as I have already pointed out, Prado erroneously equates a static
universe with one equivalent, in Saint Thomas's mind, to a
state of nothingness. For these reasons, then, we can set aside
Prado's somewhat ingenious but nonetheless inaccurate explanation of why Saint Thomas considered our dubious premise
true.
Another explanation of C (1), one very similar to Prado's
is that proposed by Father Quinn in the article to which I
referred at the beginning of my paper. Unlike Prado, however,
Quinn sees his account of the matter not only as accurately
reporting Saint Thomas's own unexpressed argument here (or
as an actual justification of C (1) given the truth of Aristotelian
physics) but, going one important step further, he actually
views it as unqualifiedly true. According to Quinn, the reason
why C (1) is true is because without the existence of some
necessary being, in this case a universal physical agent causing
substantial change, there would no longer be any generation of
new substances. 22 Yet without the generation of new sub21 In the Leonine edition the passage reads:
" Si igitur omnia sunt possibilia
non esse aliquando nihil fuit in rebus."
22 Quinn, op. cit.,

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stances, he argues, " the inevitable extinction of all beings of
nature is simply a matter of time and the whole of nature is thus
determined to collapse into nothingness." 23 Again, Quinn's
claim here is not simply that his explanation truly represents
Saint Thornas's thought, but that it is also philosophically
sound. I will now argue that his explanation not only is not,
on this matter, in complete accord with the mind of Saint
Thomas, a serious enough criticism, but that it is also philosophically untenable.
To begin with, Saint Thomas would not maintain that, given
the cessation of substantial change, the universe would soon
collapse into nothingness. As I have already pointed out in
my rejection of Prado's account of C (1), he is actually willing
to allow the continuance of a " static " world once the movements of the heavens have ceased. Nor can it be argued in
Quinn's behalf that Saint Thomas would allow this continuance
only because he already assumes God's existence and, therefore,
a divine conservation, but that otherwise he would acknowledge
how a universe lacking a universal physical cause causing substantial change would indeed collapse into nothingness. Besides
possibly begging the question, such a defense overlooks the fact
that the divine conservation (and concurrence) is also required
for the universe which Quinn describes as the actual universe,
namely, one containing his cosmic agent. Consequently, the
absence or presence of this universal generator is incidental to
the conservation of the universe (in some form) in existence.
I will have more to say on this subject in a moment. But to
return to our original point, the universe described by Saint
Thomas as existing after the " end of the world "-a universe
including certain material beings-was one which he obviously
thought could exist without collapsing into nothingness due to
the absence from it of the causality of the universal physical
cause. Therefore, Quinn's contention "without the generation
of new individuals material species would perish " is certainly
false according to Saint Thomas's teaching. What is true, ac••Ibid., 6!il.

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cording to that teaching, is that without the generation of new
substances biological species would perish. Again, Quinn (like
Prado) has apparently confused an inert and biologically lifeless
world with a non-existing one, or, at any rate, has erroneously
inferred that with no generation of new individuals all species
of material things would eventually cease to exist. Yet Saint
Thomas did think it the case that without the motion of
material necessary beings the cycle of generation and corruption
would end and, consequently, beings that would be actually
subject to corruption. That would mean, on this theory, that
even right now there would nowhere be found beings genuinely
liable to corrupt-something quite obviously contrary to fact.
In this respect, but only in this respect, can Quinn's (and
Prado's) explanation of C (1) be said to accord with Aquinas's
view.
There is also a metaphysical argument against Quinn's position concerning the dire effect on the universe given the absence,
from it, of a universal physical cause. According to Saint
Thomas's teaching, the absence of such a cause (or of its
causality) would not bring about the annihilation of material
things since only an infinite being has the power to annihilate. 24
Since, as Saint Thomas says, creation is not effected through the
instrumentality of any creature, the removal of any creature,
no matter what role we wish to assign it with respect to causing
change and new being, would not result in the annihilation
of any other creature. 25 In a word, only the Self-Existing
Being, the universal cause, has competency over the very to be
of things; only He, therefore, can effect the annihilation of any
creature.
Finally, Quinn's arguments for a universal physical cause
of change, an " equivocal " agent ultimately required to effect
"'In the words of Saint Thomas: "No creature has the power either of making
something from nothing or d reducing a thing to nothing. The fact that if God
ceased to uphold creatures they would return to nothing is not due to the
creator's action but to the creature's defect, as stated above." Q. 5, a. 3, ad 15.
25 See ibid., Q. 5, 4.
See also ibid., Q. 3, a. 4, and also Summa TheologW.e, I,
Q. 45, a. 5, and ibid. Q. 104, a. 3.

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substantial change, are, I regret to say, not very convincing,
not even to a Thomist. 26 They originate, in part, from the
Aristotelian (and medieval) theory that the heavens are incorruptible and act as " equivocal " causes and, also, that the
causality of the " lower," more proximate agent requires the
causality of the "higher," more universal physical cause in
order to effect substantial change. 27 While a modern Thomist
could agree that the divine concurrence is ultimately required
for the actions of all finite beings, he could hardly accept the
outdated view that material agents in the terrestrial realm act
as instrumental causes of the " heavens " in the work of generation and corruption or in effecting preliminary accidental
changes. Nor does Quinn argue that the heavens, or any of the
recognized heavenly bodies, act as the universal cause he holds
to be necessary for the continuation of material species (a
somewhat plausible view, one might remark, where it concerns
the survival of biological species on this planet), since he
apparently acknowledges that the heavenly bodies, at least
those that we do know, do not qualify as necessary beings.
Instead, he postulates a universal physical agent which he
willingly concedes " we are not able, and probably will never
be able, to put our finger on." 28 Surely, to allow that the
existence of such a cause may never be empirically verified
seems, particularly-I would think, to any bona-fide Aristotelian-to argue a pri,ma facie case against its existence. After
all, we are not concerned here with intrinsic principles of changing being (or even with the ultimate extrinsic cause of all
See Quinn, op. cit., 59-65.
See, in this connection, On the Power of God, Q. 5, a. 8. Since Saint Thomas's
view of the role of the heavenly bodies in causing changes in bodies in the
terrestial realm is based on the erroneous supposition that the heavenly bodies are
incorruptible and of a higher degree of actuality than corruptible bodies here, the
non-acceptance of such a supposition ought to lead to a modification of his
position concerning the precise causal role the "heavens " have to play with
respect to causing change in the world below. In other words, it could hardly be
urged today that the lower, terrestial bodies act as instrumental causes of these
" higher," heavenly bodies in causing change.
••Quinn, op. cit., 67.
26

27

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THEODORE KONDOLEON

motion or change), none of which, admittedly, are subject to
" empirical " verification, but presumably with a visible, quantified body exercising its causality through space and time.
To say, then, that we are presently unable, and perhaps never
will be able, to verify its existence savors, to this writer at least,
of the ad ignorantiam fallacy and thus renders the arguments
which have been presented in its favor doubly suspect. So
much, then, for Quinn's defense of C (1).
3. A good explanation of the "dubious premise." The
best defense of C (1), as well as the most likely explanation
why, in fact, Saint Thomas thought it to be true, has already
been given, at least in its general outline, by certain other
commentators on the Third Way. 29 My statement of it here
will be somewhat more complete.
(1) Assume at any one
mo:rnent in an infinite past the existence of any finite number
of beings possible not to be. Then (2) if each one of these
beings at some time ceases to exist and (3) if, furthermore,
each of them has also a time span in existence less than a
time span extending through an infinite past up to any arbitrarily chosen present moment, then (4) if all beings are
possible not to be, then (5) there must come a time in an
infinite past when, by then, all these beings we originally posited
would have ceased to exist (we are assuming, of course, no
replacement by way of substantial change since that would
imply the existence of something necessary, namely, matter)
and nothing would be in existence. When explained in this way
C (1) appears no longer to entail a dubious inference but
appears to be true, even convincingly so, and in view of its
obviousness, one can safely assume that this explanation of C
is precisely the one Saint Thomas himself would have used
to justify it.
However, only one thing would seem to spoil the above explanation: it apparently proceeds on a false assumption. It
proceeds on the assumption, a dual, one, that past time is
29 See Connolly, op. cit., 288.
Here Connolly summarizes A. D. Sertillanges 'sexplanation of C (1) abov.e. See also Patterson Brown, op. cit., 86-88.

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infinite and all things are possible not to be. But this assumption would seem to entail something impossible, namely,
that there can be an infinite past without something permanent
in existence. In other words, I think it can be successfully
argued that there cannot be an infinite past without the
existence of something " physically " necessary to found its
duration. 30 In other words, no finite number of things physically possible not to be, no matter how long their duration in
existence, can, it would seem, either singly or collectively,
account for an infinite past. Perhaps, then, in the final analysis
what Saint Thomas's argument here really proves is that there
cannot be an infinite past if all beings are possible not to be.
In that case, however, he should perhaps have argued, as procedurally more sound, the following:
G. (I) Either past time is infinite or finite
(2) If past time is infinite, then something necessary must
exist to account for infinite past duration
(3) If past time is finite, then the physical world had a
beginning
( 4) If the physical world had a beginning, then it must
80 I am indebted to David A. Conway's
article, " Possibility and Infinite Time:
A Logical Paradox in St. Thomas's Third Way," International Philosophical
Quarterly, XIV (1974), 201-208 for suggesting this point to me. In this article
Conway convincingly argues what he detects to be an inher.ent contradiction in
the argument of the Third Way's first part. According to Conway (who here
accepts the GilsoncCopleston version of our dubious premise, C (1) ) , this argument
assumes (1) that there is an infinite past, (2) that everything possible must be
realized in an infinite past time, and 3) that among things possible is the nonexistence of all things (if, indeed, all things are possible not to be). However,
Conway points out, a hidden contradiction lurks in these assumptions, as evident
from the following argument: For any time t that one cares to select as the time
in an infinite past at which the possibility of all things not existing is realized,
there is an infinite time prior to t; but during this infinite time prior to t there
would also b.e a time, let us call it t,. at which this possibility of all things not
existing would be realized; hence, on this argument, all things would actually
cease to exist prior to any time one cares to select as the time in an infinite past
when they have, supposedly, ceased to exist-an obvious contradiction.
One
might wonder how this affects our interpretation of C (I) above. I believe it
clearly points out the impossibility of assuming an infinite past, on the one hand,
and, on the other, that all beings are possible not to be (again assuming that
each being possible not to be at some time is not).

THEODORE KONDOLEON

have been efficiently caused to exist by a necessary being 131
(5) Therefore something necessary exists.
In any event, one can still agree with Saint Thomas's conclusion here that " not all things are (physical) possibles but
there must be something necessary in reality."
Still the
question remains whether this " something necessary " has to
be something other than matter. Saint Thomas evidently
thought so and we have now to determine whether his position
on this question can be supported by sound argument.

II.
The Failure of the Third Way's First Part
In concluding to the existence of something necessary Saint
Thomas tells us nothing, explicitly, about its nature or number.
However, from the wording of the Third ·way's second part,
one may infer that he has in mind here, not matter, but some
actual being and that he is also prepared to recognize a plurality
of such beings. This impression is confirmed by what we know
about his physical philosophy generally and by what he has
stated textually
Thus, inasmuch as it is only the
potential principle in the substance of a corruptible being,
matter (prime matter) is not a necessary being; furthermore,
as something purely potential, it cannot account for the existence
now of actual being. In order to do that, Saint Thomas believed,
one would have to look to the causality, and hence to the
existence, of some actual being, but one which is also a necessary being. As to the number of such beings, that, he would
likely say, would depend upon the number of heavenly bodies
and their spheres and also upon the role assigned to angels in
the governance of the world. 33 Consequently, while Saint
See Summa contra Gentiles, Book I, Ch. 15 (6).
See ibid., Ch. 15, for an argument that closely resembles the Third Wavr in
form and which would seem to support the above interpretation.
38 See Summa Theologiae. I, Q. llO, a. 1, ad 2.
However, Saint Thomas does
not limit the number of spiritual creatures to the number of movers of the
heavenly bodies.
81

82

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Thomas makes no use of a causal argument here to infer the
existence of something necessary in being, it is reasonable to
suppose, in view of his statements elsewhere, that he evidently
saw a cause-effect relationship obtaining between the necessary
being (s) whose existence he was certain he had now established
and the on-going generation, in our terrestrial realm, of new
individual substances. Otherwise, according to him, one would
be at a loss to explain why certain classes of substances
(particularly plants and animals) continue to exist nigh endlessly and to exercise their generative powers (£or " whatever is
moved is moved by another ") .
In connection with what I have just remarked above, it
should be recalled that Aristotle's theory of incorruptible
heavenly bodies was a universally accepted part of medieval
" physics " and that these bodies were believed responsible, as
universal causes, £or the perpetual cycle of generation and
corruption observed in the " sublunar " world. Given such an
outlook, it is easy to see how Saint Thomas could find, in
empirical reality, ready confirmation of something to which he
thought the Third Way's first part had correctly concluded,
namely, the existence of necessary being. Moreover, he also
shared with Aristotle the view that the heavenly spheres were
moved by spiritual substances, although, as we have seen, he
Consewould substitute angels £or Aristotle's "star-souls".
quently, when Saint Thomas concluded here to the existence
of necessary being, he was, in effect, at the same time acknowledging the existence of immaterial being. Admittedly, in
terms of what the argument has to say explicitly, this point is
by no means clear; yet in light of what I have just argued and
what we know to be his philosophy generally it is, nonetheless,
true. However, and this observation I deem extremely important, he was certainly not prepared at this stage of the argument
to identify the existence of any necessary being with God. He
was not prepared to do so because he clearly recognized that his
conclusion here, in the first part of the Third Way, was simply
the existence of the cause of motion in the world, not the
existence of the cause of existence, namely, the Self-Existing

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Being. Since, as in Aristotle's philosophy, a plurality of necessary beings could be postulated to explain, as more or less ultimate causes, this motion (and other changes resulting therefrom), and since none of these beings would have to be seen as
self-existing, further argument would be required if the Third
Way was to conclude to God:s existence. Hence its second
part.
At this point I believe we are now ready to settle the question
concerning the Third Way's first part. Can we today accept its
argument as actually establishing the existence of necessary
(i. e. incorruptible) being? As I have indicated earlier, it does
point to the existence of something necessary. However, I am
also convinced it does not prove the existence of any incorruptible substance. As I have explained above, in order to arrive at
such a conclusion Saint Thomas had, in keeping with the physics
of his day, to suppose that the continued existence of corruptibles as a class was something to be explained (in part) by
imperishable heavenly bodies, their movements, and their
movers. Can we today accept such a supposition? I believe the
answer is obvious. We no longer view the heavenly bodies as
incorruptible, since science has persuaded us otherwise. Nor
do we find it necessary to explain their movements by recourse to spiritual movers. The existence of man-made satellites orbiting the earth and space vehicles moving towards
other planets is a constant present-day reminder of the erroneous character of Aristotle's (and Thomas's) theory concerning
the motion of bodies (or at least of their theory concerning
the cause, or causes, of such motion). As for the continued
existence of material species, particularly organic substances, I
see no reason why that cannot adequately be explained, at least
on the level of finite causes of change, by the " necessary "
uniform movement of the planets about the sun (I consider
here only our solar system) and the regular causality of physical
agents (each one corruptible) causing changes and new being.
In this respect we would, for the most part, be simply acknowledging the same causal influences recognized by Aristotle and
Aquinas to account £or the continuance of generation and

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corruption and the preservation of biological species, without,
however, admitting the existence of incorruptible substances
and certainly not ones to be identified with the heavens and
their supposed spiritual movers.
If, on the other hand, we were to allow, as I think we must,
that the planets and the remainder of the "heavens" did have
an origin in time, we would then have a basis for inferring the
existence of an immaterial agent. However, this would involve
us in another argument for God's existence (perhaps some
form of the First Way), clearly one different in form from
the Third Way's first part. What the Third Way's first
part does seem to conclude to, soundly, is, as I have said,
the existence of something necessary. Still, need this be
really anything other than the underlying principle of substantial change-prime matter? I see no reason to think so.
However, I am also prepared to extend the notion of " necessary " to the laws of mass-energy and motion. Explained
according to scholastic principles, this latter necessity would
be something due to the natures given to material things by
the creator.
It would also presuppose the continuance in
existence of a plurality of bodies. Given all this, along with
the regular causality of material agents, I believe we have
a good explanation, at least on the level of finite causes
of change, why certain classes of corruptible beings (particularly biological species) continue to exist rather than cease to
exist. Contrary to Quinn's position, then, I see no need for
a universal physical cause of change; natural agents, by virtue
of their own active and passive powers, are able to effect and
undergo such changes as are required to continually populate
reality with new individuals of the different material species
(I do not, of course, rule out the need for the divine concurrence). One would have to conclude, therefore, that the
Third Way's first part does not, of itself, establish the existence
of a necessary being, not even a caused one, and that, consequently, at least as originally formulated, it brings us no
closer to knowing that God exists than we were at its beginnmg.

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III.
The Third Way's Second Part
At the beginning of my paper I noted certain difficulties
about the Third Way's second part which, as I said then,
cannot properly be ignored in any discussion of its overall
soundness. One concerned the reason why Saint Thomas
thought it necessary to inquire into a cause of a necessary
being's necessity. Presumably, any necessary being would have
its necessity of itself, that is to say, by virtue of its own
incorruptible nature. Another raised the question why he
maintained, as the Third Way's conclusion clearly implies,
that there can only be one uncaused necessary being. Finally,
there was also the question, one pertaining more to the argument's formal structure than actually to the question of its
soundness, why he considered it appropriate to entertain an
infinite series objection in the case of caused necessary beings.
According to his mature teaching on this subject, necessary
beings, if caused, can only be caused by creation and only God
can create. 34 To none of these questions does the Third Way's
second part, at least as explicitly formulated, give us even a
clue to an answer. However, as would be expected, Saint
Thomas has indicated elsewhere in his writings how he would
respond to at least the first and second of these questions. It
will be noted how in these responses a central doctrine of
his metaphysics figures prominently, thereby revealing the
essential metaphysical character of the Third Way's second
part or why it manages to conclude to the existence of the
self-existing being (i. e. God) .
••In a very early text (The Commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard,
II, D. I, Q. 1, a. 8) Saint Thomas did not rule out the possibility thait the
creative power could be communicated by God to certain creatures so that
they could act instrumentally in the production de nihilo. In later works, however, he argues the impossibility of creatures acting instrumentally in creation.
See, for example, On the Power of God, Q. 8, a. 4; see also Summa Theofogiae, I,
Q. 45, a. 5.

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I. How a necessary being may also be a caused one. In what
sense, if any, can it be claimed that a necessary being has a
cause of its necessity? Saint Thomas's response to this
question would be, as certain texts clearly show, to point out
that while a necessary being, only granted that it exists, has it
of its nature to be always in existence, it can still depend upon
another being for its existence. 35 In his view such a dependency
would apply to every finite necessary being whether spiritual
or material (as we have seen, he also believed the latter type
existed) . Consequently, Aquinas would inform us, while of its
nature incorruptible a necessary being could not exist incorruptibly if it did not, first, exist. 36 In this way, then, a necessary
being can depend upon another for its necessity in being, that
is, if it depends upon another being for its existence. Briefly
put, Saint Thomas's reply to our question would be as follows:
necessary beings can owe their necessity in being to a being
to whom they would owe (and continually owe) their existence.
Why he thought that necessary beings (or certain necessary
beings) would need to have their existence caused, we have yet
to consider.
When, therefore, Saint Thomas arrived (so he thought) at
the existence of some necessary being (s) at the conclusion of
the Third Way's first part, he could still meaningfully inquire
whether its (or their) necessity was caused. As I have previously indicated, at this stage of the argument he had, to his
35 To quote
Aquinas on this point: "Avicenna held that all things except
God have in themselves a possibility of being and non-being. Because seeing
that existence is something besides the essence of a created thing, the very
nature of a creature considered in itself has a possibility of being, while it only
has necessity of being from another whose nature is its being ... Accordingly, a
possibility of non-being is in the nature of those things alone whose matter is
subject to contrariety of forms: whereas it belongs to other things by their
nature to exist of necessity, all possibility of non-existence being removed from their
nature. And yet this does not imply tlmt their necessity of existence is not from
God: since one necessity may cause another (Metaphysics, V). For the created
nature to which everlastingness belongs is produced by God." On the Power of
God, Q. 5, a. 8. See also Summa Theologiae, I, Q. 44, a. 1, ad !il and Q. 50,
a. 5, ad S.
••See ibid., Q. 44, a. 1, ad 2.

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own mind, only concluded to the existence of a cause of
motion or change in the world (yet perhaps not the ultimate
cause), not to the cause of existence., Since, in his view,
a plurality of such beings-universal causes of motion or change
in the world-could not be ruled out, he had also to raise the
question whether their necessity was caused or not. It should,
I think, be obvious that what he was now actually asking was
whether such beings have their existence caused. However,
because he chose to follow closely here the argument's original
wording-he had derived it from Maimonides-his phrasing of
the Third Way's second part has, apparently, obscured its
meaning for many. Yet otherwise understood, except perhaps
within the context of an Avicennian emanation theory to
which, in point of fact, he did not subscribe, the question of a
cause of a necessary being's necessity, or of a series of such
causes, simply makes no sense. One may conclude, therefore,
that the main philosophical question of the Third Way's second
part concerns the self-existing-or non-self-existing-character
of the necessary being (s) presumably already demonstrated
to exist.
2. Inference to the uncaused Necessary Being. When interpreted in this fashion the Third Way now seems able to conclude directly to the existence of an uncaused necessary being
whom one can truly call God. For, as Saint Thomas had previously argued in a much earlier work in a text of capital
importance whose teaching he would never basically alter, if
existence is not intrinsic to a being's essence or nature, it
must he efficiently caused in that being, ultimately by a being
which is self-existing. 37 In his view, no finite being, no matter
37 To quote
Saint Thomas on this matter: " Now whatever belongs to a
being is either caused by the princip1es of its nature, as the capability of
laughter in man, or it comes to it from some extrinsic principle, as light in the
air from the ,sun's influence. But it is impossible that the act of existing be caused
by a thing's form or quiddity (I say caused as by an efficient cause); for then
something would be the cause of itself and bring itself into existence-which is
impossible. Everything, then, which is such that its act of existing is other
than its nature must needs have its act of existing from something else. And

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how superior its nature, would be a being whose essence i-s its
own act of existence; consequently, it would have to be said to
receive its existence from another, ultimately (or directly)
from the self-existing being. Once given the existence of any
necessary being, then, as a conclusion of an argument from
change (be it substantial or accidental change), one would
also have to conclude to the existence of a self-existing (necessary) being which is, therefore, uncaused. This is unmistakably true according to the principles of Saint Thomas's philosophy.
In view of what I have just stated, it is not difficult to see
how Saint Thomas would have answered our second question,
why not a plurality of uncaused necessary beings? Doubtless he
would first point out that a self-existing being is one which is
infinite and, therefore, unique. 38 It is infinite because, unlike
finite beings whose essences are just so many different potentialities (or limiting) principles for existence, its existence iFl
not received (and therefore not limited) by a distinct, limiting
principle of potential existence. 39 It is, in a word, a Pure
(or Unlimited) Act of Existence. He would end by noting that
this Self-Existing Being would necessarily be the ultimate
source of existence to all other beings, which are only beings by
participation. 40
Yet if my account of what the Third Way's second part is
really, though only implicitly, arguing is correct, how explain
since every being which exists through another is reduced, as to its first cause, to
one existing in virtue of itself, there must be some being which is the cause of
the existing of all things because it itself is the act of existing alone." On· Being
and Essence, trans. by Armand Maurer (T·oronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval
Studies, 1949), p. 47. Saint Thomas had earlier argued in this chapter (Chapter
4) that there can be only one Self-Existing Being and that all other beings entail
the composition of essence and existence.
88 " The fact that the being of God is self-subsisting, not received into anything
else, and is thus called infinite, shows God to be distinguished from all other
beings, and all others to be apart from Him." Summa Theofogiae, I, Q. 7, a. l,
ad 3.
39 See ibid., c.; use also ibid., a. fl.
'° See ibid., Q. 44, a. I.

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why Saint Thomas also found it necessary in this same part of
the argument to raise and reject the possibility of an infinite
series of caused necessary beings? In other words, why should
he have bothered to consider an infinite series objection in an
argument in which he supposedly recognizes that if a necessary
being is caused it is only because it is not self-existing and,
therefore, must receive its existence from the one self-existing
being-God? This question has particular force in the present
context, since, as I have already mentioned, according to his
later teaching creation is the work of God alone (and necessary
beings, if caused, can only be caused by creation). As I see it,
this difficulty admits to two possible solutions: one would
liken his procedure here to one which he employs in an
important early work which I have already cited; the other
would explain it as involving more a point of the argument's
historical antecedents than a part of Saint Thomas's own philosophy. I happen to favor the second explanation.
The first, as I have said, directs us to an important early
work, De Ente et Essentia, where Saint Thomas, after noting
that beings whose essences and acts of existence are not one and
the same must have their existence extrinsically caused, concludes to the existence of a self-existing being under pain of
proceeding ad infinitum in causes of existence. 41 While he neglects to mention why he thinks an infinite regress in causes of
existence is impossible, it is most likely because he saw how
such a regress would leave the existence of every being ultimately unexplained. In other words, his position here would
be, I believe, that given such a regress there would be no
sufficient reason why there should be anything in existence at
all.
in this particular text he was not concerned with
the question of an infinite series of caused necessary beings,
where each one in the series would, presumably, have its
existence from a prior necessary being, but with the more
41 On Being and Essence, Ch. 4.
Saint Thomas simply observes here that " if
that were not so, we would proceed to infinity among causes, since, as we have
said, every being which is not the act of existing alone has a cause of its existence."
(Maurer trans., p. 47) .

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general case of any being which must have its existence caused
(and which possibly could derive its existence, as from a
proximate cause, from another finite being) . Thus, perhaps
in the Third Way's second part Saint Thomas wishes to show
that an infinite series of caused necessary beings is also impossible,
it too would imply that the existence of such
beings has been left without an ultimate explanation. Indeed,
he does refer us here back to the Second Way, in which he has
already rejected an infinite series of essentially ordered causes
of a thing's coming into existence (through change) presumably
because this, ultimately, would leave the effect without a cause
(and thus without explanation).
However, as I have pointed out above, where it is a
question of the cause of a necessary being's existence there can
be no possibility of any series of causes, not even a finite one.
Such a being's existence can only be accounted for by God,
as Saint Thomas consistently teaches in his later works. Hence,
the more likely explanation of this puzzling step in the argument would seem to be the following. One should recall again
that Saint Thomas derived his Third Way directly from Maimonides; its striking similarity to an argument for God's existence developed by this 12th century Jewish philosopher-theologian leaves little doubt of that. 42 In his own formulation of
the argument, Maimonides, following Avicenna, allows for a
series of necessary beings whose necessity is caused but
concludes to a being which has its necessity of being from
itself. In adopting Maimonides's argument Aquinas also retained this part of it, quite likely to show that, even within an
emanation theory, one must arrive at one uncaused necessary
being "whom all men call God." Actually, then, as I would
explain it, this step of the Third Way is more a concession
of its author to the argument's original pattern and thus to a
philosophical theory then historically in vogue-and which,
incidentally could be cited to support the demonstrability of
God's existence-than it is for him a strict requirement of this
••See Moses Maimonides, Guide of the Perplexed, II, 1, 8a-8b.

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particular proof of God's existence. In any event, it is
certainly true that in Saint Thomas's philosophy a plurality of
necessary beings points to the existence of one, and only one,
uncaused necessary being, since only one being can be selfexisting.
I think, by now, I have sufficiently established that in the
Third Way's second part Saint Thomas seeks to demonstrate
the existence of one uncaused necessary being by arguing,
albeit implicitly, that its causality is actually required to explain
the existence of any necessary being which is not self-existing.
Admittedly, one finds no textual indication here that the argument rests upon a prior recognition that a necessary being
need not be self-existing. In other words, we are not told
that this inference to the existence of an uncaused necessary
being is also an inference to the existence of the self-existing
being and thus presupposes a doctrine central to Saint Thomas's
philosophy, namely, his doctrine of participation. 43 However,
in light of what he has stated elsewhere about necessary beings
requiring a cause, there seems to be no other possible way to
interpret the argument of the Third Way's second part so as to
make sense of its inquiry into a cause of a necessary being's
necessity. When understood in this way, the argument can be
seen to conclude directly to the existence of a self-existing
(and, hence, absolutely necessary) being, which is uncaused,
absolutely unique, and the cause of the existence of all finite
beings.

IV.
A Reconstruction of the Third Way
What, then, may be finally said about the value of the Third
Way as an actual proof of God's existence? While a Thomist
could find little to object to in the argument's second part
(except, perhaps, its lack of explicitness concerning the essence•• In other words, the doctrine of the real distinction of essence and existence
in all beings save one (namely, God). This doctrine implies that such beings are
participated beings and hence efficiently caused by the
Being.

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'ENCORE'

353

existence composition in certain necessary beings), yet inasmuch as that part rests upon the first part's conclusion-a
conclusion we have seen to be unwarranted by sound physical
philosophy-the entire argument must, logically it would seem,
be rejected. Still there may be a way of reformulating this
argument from the "possible and the necessary" to have it
serve its original purpose. I have pointed out how part of the
Third Way (the second) makes use of, although implicitly, a
doctrine Saint Thomas employed elsewhere to establish God's
existence. Might not this doctrine be used again, this time to
better advantage, in a different formulation of the Third Way,
one which happens to avoid the erroneous physical philosophy
of the original? I believe it can. The reformulation I have
in mind consists in a relatively brief argument and can be presented in the following five steps:
H. (1) What undergoes generation and corruption has a subject
of generation and corruption which, itself, is not subject
to generation and corruption and therefore is something
necessary
(fl) Certain things do undergo generation and corruption
(3) Therefore something necessary exists
(4) This something necessary is not self-existing
(5) Therefore, it must receive its existence ultimately from
a being which is self-existing and who is, traditionally, called
God.

In proof of H (1) we can argue that if a thing comes into
being or ceases to exist as a result of change, then there
must be some subject of change remaining throughout the
change, something " out of which " the effect came and which
"supports" the new determination (or form) of existence.
Otherwise, something would be coming into existence " out of
nothing," which would entail, not change, but creation. In
Aristotelian philosophy, this subject of change, at least where
it is a question of substantial change, is prime matter. Since
matter, in this sense, is the subject of the ultimate (i. e. substantial) change, it itself cannot be subject to such change and
is, therefore, something necessary. Moreover, this principle

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THEODORE KONDOLEON

is either eternal (as Aristotle believed) or something created
(or, more exactly, co-created with form) in a temporal beginning of the universe. If, in fact, the latter, then obviously
there exists a creator, a necessary being. However, if matter is
eternal, then the question can be raised: why does it exist
rather than not exist? It is certainly not something self-existing.
(I will return to this point momentarily).
But even if one
were to reject this Aristotelian concept of matter, by denying
substantial change, he would still be required to acknowledge
the existence of something necessary, something which endures
or remains throughout change. Today, many philosophers
(most empiricists) prefer to identify this" necessary" substrate
of change with matter thought of as mass-energy. 44
H (2) is, quite evidently, a fact of experience. Even those
who deny substantial change would still agree that certain
things may be said to be " generated " (i. e. come into being)
and certain things "corrupted" (i. e. cease to exist). From
what has been discussed above regarding H (1), and from H
(2), H (3) follows of necessity. We must now prove H (4),
namely, that matter, regardless of how we understand it (i. e.
either in its Aristotelian or in its modern sense) is not
self-existing. Let us take first the concept of matter as massenergy. Aside from the fact that matter, viewed in this way, is
a mere abstraction (if there exists a plurality of different
kinds of material substance, no one of them could, in essence,
••James W. Corman and Keith Lehrer would seem to subscribe to this view
in their Philosophical Problems and Arguments: An Introduction (New York:
Macmillan Co., 1974), pp. 360-367. So also would Anthony Kenny in op. cit.,
p. 69, where he states: "In order to show that the uncaused everlasting being
must be <kid, he (Aquinas) offers no proof, and w1e may ask why might it not
be perpetual, indestructible matter! If the first part of the Third Way has
any force at all, the matter <0f an everlasting world would be matter with
a natural power of everlasting existence. And what better explanation could one
want of an everlasting existence than a natural power for everlasting existence?
In what way would God's eternal existence be more self-explanatory than the
everlasting existence of matter with a natural indestructibility?"
As I will argue
above shortly, Saint Thomas's answer oo Kenny's question would be that matter
does not have existence intrinsic to its essence or nature and therefore would
require to receive its existence from a Self-Existing Being whom we call God.

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be simply mass-energy; it would have to be mass-energy of a
certain determination, form or structure) , it is also something which is found in many and, as it exists concretely, is
in potency to change. For a Thomist this could only mean
that it is not its own existence, but that it is in potency to
existence. What is self-existing (i. e. a being whose very
essence is the same as its existence) is absolutely one (unique)
and nowise in potency. It is, in a word, a being of pure
(or unlimited) act. The limitations just noted with respect
to matter thought of as mass-energy would also apply, a
fortiori, to matter viewed in its Aristotelian sense. Since matter,
therefore, is not its own existence, it must receive its existence
(prime matter would receive existence through its form) from
another-ultimately
(assuming instrumental causes to be
operative in the communication of new existence through
change) from a self-existing being, one whose proper effect
is the universal effect (existence) and who, as the Unparticipated Being, is the universal cause. While I, personally, find
this argument sound, I would not suggest, not even for a
moment, that it could ever convince a non-Thomist. After
all, it depends radically upon Saint Thomas' s doctrine of essence
and existence (or participation); and if that doctrine is not
accepted as philosophically sound, so neither will my reformulation, nor perhaps any reformulation, of the Third Way be so
accepted.
Conclusion

In this paper I have tried, among other things, to show how
Saint Thomas's Third Way does not commit the composition
fallacy with which it has been frequently charged in recent
years. I think I have done this successfully; hence the argument
ought not to be rejected on that score. However, I have also
argued that its first part's conclusion entails an erroneous piece
of physical philosophy which vitiates the entire argument.
Despite its failure to establish the existence of any necessary
(i. e. incorruptible) being, I thought it important to examine
certain questions legitimately raised concerning the Third

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THEODORE KONDOLEON

Way's second part in order to show how Saint Thomas's doctrine of essence and existence (or participation) has a key role
to play in this argument, although one ostensibly " offstage."
That this fundamental doctrine of Saint Thomas's metaphysics
should figure in some way in a Thomistic proof of God's existence should not in the least surprise us. As I took care to note
in the course of my discussion, it is deeply involved in one
of Aquinas's earliest arguments for God's existence and, I might
add here, it is also very much implied in the argument from
"gradation in being" (the Fourth Way). While an argument
from change (the First and the Second Ways) based on the
principle of change (" whatever is moved is moved by another ")
is undeniably easier to grasp than a metaphysical argument for
God's existence, a fact which may perhaps explain the First
Way's popularity with many Thomists of the past, I think it
should be clear that any argument from change can only
conclude to an ultimate cause of change, an unmoved mover,
but not to a being which would be seen as the cause of
existence (and, thus, as the self-existing being) . To arrive at
that conclusion, namely, the existence of the self-existing being,
God, one is required, I am convinced, to make use of an argument which in some way acknowledges the essence-existence
composition in the beings of our direct and immediate experience
(or, in other words, their" participated being" character). In
my reformulation of the Third Way, I have simply tried to
apply that conviction to practice.
THEODORE KoNDOLEON
Villanova University
Villanova, Pennsylvania

TOWARD A RENEWAL OF SACRAMENTAL THEOLOGY

N

0 TASK FACING CATHOLIC THEOLOGY is
today more urgent than that of recovering the meaning of the sacramental worship of the Church, whose
reality is that of the Church in history and in the world. What
this reality may be is contested, and the classic theology of
sacrament and Church seems no longer able to respond to the
issues posed by the contemporary mind, stated as they are in
a language borrowed from the modern disciplines of history,
psychology, sociology and hermeneutics.
The ontological
interest of scholastic theology, and the nominalist juridicalontological mentality of the counter-reformation
theologians
find few echoes in modern historical consciousness, before whose
criticism their notions of reality are found charged with a nonhistorical naivete. Included in that indictment is most of the
language by which the Church's worship has been designated:
a certain distaste for all talk of sacramental objectivity and
historical concreteness is manifest in much of the contemporary
discussion. The corollary, no novelty in the history of the
Church, is a considerable dilution of the Catholic confidence in
the sacramental immanence 0:£ Christ in the world of our daily
encounter.
And yet, there are other naivetes than the ontic: if the classical theological realism threatened to become a mechanics of
grace, the contemporary socio-historical hermeneutic, equally
intent upon the identity of history with its phenomena,
threatens no less to become a statistics. 1 Both tendencies illus1 Such a statistics
of grace results when reliance may not be placed in the
efficacy of any particular sacramental event, as, e.g. a magisterial definition, a
Eucharistic consecration, a baptism or ordination. The Church's "indefectibility"
in grace and truth then has no cash value in any particular instance, and
amounts to no more than an actuarial description of a reality which in the
concrete is always indeterminate.

857

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DONALD J. KEEFE, S. J.

trate the simplism which accepts the common-sense dichotomies of reason as regulative of theological truth. Particularly
within the Thomist tradition, these dichotomies have made a
wasteland of Catholic systematic theology, for they have subordinated the treatment of grace to the Aristotelian category
of accident, thereby forcing upon that theology the notion of
a natural creation constructed on Aristotelian lines and having
only a nominal, because intrinsically inexplicable, substantial
contingency. The pre-Vatican II emphasis upon the natural
(as in natural law, the natural knowledge of God, the natural
virtues) has recoiled upon its scholastic advocates, for its
cosmological and quasi-sacramental meaning, taken for granted
by St. Thomas, is now displaced by an entirely secular calculus
of value. This has had its most profound consequences in moral
theology, for many of whose adepts the Church can claim no
privileged insights in re morali, but equivalent implications
also infect the theology of history; there too natural secular
freedom and historicity are held in contrast with a pseudoexistence, lived in ecclesial suppression.
But such poised alternatives are the stuff of dualism, nor is
that ancient mistake avoided by recourse to the systematic
vocabularies of the newer disciplines of the humane sciences.
The name under which reality travels is not a magical means of
controlling it; the history of speculative thought can summon a
host of witnesses to the inescapability of reason's dichotomies,
dichotomies whose paradigm is the classical enigma of the one
and the many. Whether we theologize under the aegis of ontology, of sociology, of history or of whatever other mode of synthesis, we are engaged in the task of understanding the revelation given in the Christ, a task whose prius is that we do not
subordinate that Truth to any methodological criterion of the
true, however, sophisticated.
For in this revelation the most fundamental dichotomy of all
is overthrown: that which has isolated God from man, from
history and from the world. This isolation, the commonplace
of all dualism and the implication of all autonomous rationality,
is contradicted by the a priori of Christian theology, the Good

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News which is given us in Christ. The first consequence of this
a priori is that creation is no longer ambivalent, for it is created
in Christ: it is charged with His significance; it is holy, awaiting
its full redemption; it is mysterious, bearing a truth which is
truly its own but not yet known in its fullness. A relation is
then established between what is and what shall be when
creation is fulfilled in the Kingdom. This relation is as concretely actual as the Christ in whom it is founded; in it, the
truth of our world subsists, insofar as Catholic theology can
be concerned with the world and with its history. This theological concern inevitably embraces the entire range of the
humane sciences; these, by accepting the normative Truth of the
revelation, become theological disciplines. Apart from that
transformation, they only continue to generate their own
dichotomies, incapable in their autonomy even of integrating
those data which their methodologies exist to integrate. 1 •
Nonetheless, the intellectual optimism which is the hallmark
of Catholic theology can by no means become an intellectual
arrogance without immediately falling victim to the same
sterility which marks any other delusion of humanistic selfsufficiency. The rational constructs of the theological enterprise guard their value only as hypotheses, as possessing no
truth of their own save that of the relation they bear to the
revelation. That relation can be no more than an expression of
the human indigence for the Truth which we cannot command,
however fully it be present for our worship.
Thus the crises of Catholic theology are not transcended by
recourse to regnant disciplines heretofore neglected; these lights
also will fail whenever they are employed to compensate for the
immanent deficiencies of their predecessors. No doubt it will al1 • The dissolution, from Duns Scotus onward,
of the Augustinian unity of
philosophy and theology marks the beginning of what will become under
Descartes the selfconscious attempt of modern philosophy to re-establish through
autonomous reason the inteUectual certitude which Augustine knew to be given only
by divine illumination. This quest for certitude has rediscovered all the dichotomies long ago uncovered by the pre-Socratics in their own equivalent quest
for the unity of reality and shares their failure.

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DONALD J. KEEFE,

S. J.

ways be necessary to pose the perennial problematic in a terminology as topical as may be, but all such terminologies must
suffer an intrinsic change of meaning by the mere fact of becoming theological; they thus lose their facility, their immanent logic,
for they engage a problem transcendent to it, and those most
accustomed to their secular denotation are most troubled by
their theological translation, and particularly by the rejection
of the familiar dichotomies which that translation or transforation must entail. The dichotomy whose rejection is found
most scandalous is the primordial one, between divine and
human autonomy, and in our day it is in the theology of the
sacraments that this scandal is most poignantly renewed.
The scandal is not to be avoided, and only a badly mistaken
ecumenism will attempt to do so. From any status quo ante,
whether that of Greek ontology or German sociological hermeneutics or Roman law or Anglo-American linguistic analysis
or whatever other humanism may be in point, the theological
use and conversion of the rational and autonomous dynamic
of scientific inquiry is unwarranted and illegitimate. The theologian's task is of course easily misunderstood, but it is most
scandalous when it is not misunderstood.
There can be little need to detail the profound uneasiness
experienced by the contemporary consciousness in its encounter
with Catholic theology's employment, with reference to God's
immanence in humanity and the world, of language generally
thought sacred to the empirical sciences: the language of objectivity, concreteness, historicity, actuality and the like. To
the immediate objection that such a usage effectively reduces
God to a thing, that theology has replied that the proper
denotation of these terms is sacramental, not simply empirical
or pragmatic, as the scientific mentality confidently supposes.
Of late, this reply has been given less frequently and with a
greater diffidence, for theologians have been discovering a defect
in the classical theology of the sacraments which, when remedied, seems to undercut the entire project. This failure, the
lack of 'historical consciousness' now thought to have prevailed in Catholic theology until the eve of Vatican II or

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thereabouts, is generally taken to be the absence of any awareness in the Church that its doctrine, and a fortiori all systematic
entry into that doctrine, are alike contained within and
subordinate to an autonomous temporal process of uncovenanted
change, 2 a process whose elements submit to no rationale of
' development' whereby a given statement of truth might
change with time and yet remain itself.
Vatican II seems to have lent some offhand support to this
view of historical consciousness by distinguishing the historical
formulations of doctrine from the doctrine itself, thereby permitting the inference that the latter is immune to change because without essential immanence in any of its historical expressions.3 It is unlikely that the conciliar £.athers intended to
underwrite Schleiermacher's reply to the cultured despisers of
religion, 4 but such uncautious obiter dicta may serve to indicate
2 This tension between the Church
and the history which conditions the expression of her faith is a commonplace of contemporary Protestant ecumenism:
see Miceal Ledwith, "The Theology of Tradition in the World Council of
Churches," Irish Theological Quarterly, vol. 43, no. 2, (1976) 104-123, for an
examination of the contrasting Protestant and Catholic views (the latter as
developed in Dei Verbum, the Vatican II Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation) of the relation of the Church to the doctrinal tradition. Ledwith finds
Gerhard Ebeling's influence upon the W.C.C. deliberations quite evident.
8 Gaudium et Spes, n. 62: " for the deposit and truths
of faith are one thing,
the manner of expressing them quite another." The Documents of Vatican II,
ed. A. P. Flannery, Pilgrim Books, New York, 1975, p. 966. However, within
the spirit of Vatican II, the freedom to gloss this text is limited, for Dei
Ve1·bum teaches that the Church is the active historical subject of the process
of tradition: this in contradiction to the W. C. C. Montreal Report (see note
2, supra) wherein the tradition is simply identified with Jesus on principles common
to Barth and to Ebeling. For the latter, a continually new interpretation of
tradition is necessary, since the linguistic form in which the faith is couched
is essentially relative, and permits no infallibility anywhere: see Ledwith, art ci"t.,
p. 119. Ebeling's own assessment of the Catholic-Protestant disagreement over the
normative value of the Church's history may be found in his The Word of God
and Tradition, tr. S. H. Hooke, the Fortress Press, Philadelphia, 1968, particularly
in the first essay, "Church History as the History of the Exposition of Scripture."
He finds between the two positions an irreducible difference. However, his own
interpretation of the Catholic view of Church history is badly skewed by the
sola fide emphasis which dominates his theology.
•Friedrich Schleiermacher, On Rdigion: Addresses in Response to its Cultured
Critics, tr. with intro. and notes by Terrence N. Tice, John Knox Press, Richmond,

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DONALD J. KEEFE, S. J.

the seriousness of the problem confronting the theologian concerned for sacramental realism: it is precisely that concern for
realism which is identified, by reason of its association with the
ontological method of classical theology, with that theology's
supposed lack of historical consciousness, while at the same time,
historical consciousness is commonly understood in such a
manner as to submit the Church's sacramental reality, in worship, in mission, in doctrine, to secular criteria which are in
formal contradiction to the Revelation by which the Church
subsists. 5
The first issue to be faced in any attempt to renew Catholic
sacramental theology is then that of discovering the sacramental meaning of history and of historical existence and consciousness. This issue dominates all the rest, which now are
more and more dealt with as functions of it or elements within
it.
The problem is not unfamiliar: it recurs whenever the autonomous mind is at work upon its autonomous subject, whether
world, or man, or history, or being. The contemporary categorial shift from ' being ' to ' history ' may serve to free previously neglected contents within our consciousness for theological exploitation, but it is hardly the case that the shift is as
Va., 1969; see especially the second address, "The Essence of Religion," 139-145,
in which the author's programmatic differentiation between " religion " and
" knowledge " is first explained.
5 A good illustration
of this notion of historical consciousness is provided by
Avery Dulles in his recent The Resilient Church, Doubleday and Co., Inc., Garden
City, New York, 1977, p&ticularly in the second chapter.
John O'Malley's
article, "Reform, Historical Consciousness and Vatican II's Aggiomamento,"
Theological Studies, vol. 32 (1971) no. 4, 573-601, is still the dearest statement
of this view of the Church's subjection to history as to an autonomous historical
dynamism. See also the two issues of Co-nciliurn edited by Roger Aubert:
Church History in Future Pers-pective (Concilium, v. 57), Herder and Herder,
New York, 1970, and History: Self-Understanding of the Church (Concilium, v.
67), Herder and Herder, New York, 1971. The collections of essays edited by
James M. Robinson and John B. Cobb, New Frontiers in Theology, 3 vols.,
Harper and Row, New York, 1963-1967, provide an invaluable entry into the
complex inteITelations of hermeneutical theory and the thcdogy of history.
Ebeling's contribution may be found in the second volume, The New Hermeneutic:
" ·word of God and Hermeneutic," pp. 78-110.

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drastic as has been claimed: a properly historical consciousness
is not so easily attained. As long as history is understood to
he an autonomous dynamism 6 transcending all finite reality,
we have simply elevated a philosophy of history to that
spurious eminence formerly occupied by such tenants of the
mode as Aristotelian metaphysics; the latter thought to legislate
for the ontology of the Revelation, while the former would do
the same for its historicity. Neither can reckon with the higher
Truth of the Christ in his Church without losing that autonomy
which the contemporary secular version of ' critical intelligence '
demands for itself. Such autonomy must objectify its subject
matter-history, in the case at hand-and so resists all immanence within it. This can hardly be the device by which a
valid sense of historical existence is arrived at; to exist historically
is precisely to recognize one's immanence within history, and
consequently to refuse all those intimations of transcendence to
which the philosophies of history are subject. No doubt ontologies are equally liable to this kind of triumphalism, as are all
other exercises of critical reason. We are particularly aware today of the moral obligation underlying the use of the critical
intelligence: it is no longer possible to urge a voluntaristic
sacri,ficium intellecfas as an appropriate Christian piety. But
it would be equally immoral to elevate that intelligence to the
status of a prime truth before which even the truth of Christ
must make obeisance: one cannot serve two masters. We may
conclude that the theological conversion of critical reason
is a refusal of the servile mind on the one hand, and of the
over-weening mind on the other: neither is capable of doing
theology.
• "Autonomous histQry " is no more than an illustration of the fallacy of misplaced concreteness until some attempt is made to come to terms with its
implication of either (1) a self-sufficient historical method whose canons of
interpretation await no higher legitimation, or (2) a self-sufficient community of
Herrenvolk whose hermeneutical consensus is similarly normative for the human
condition. Scholars such as Jacob Burckhardt, Karl Loewith, Christopher Dawson
and Eric Voegelin have long recognized and stmggled with the problem of the
intellectual dead end which is historicism, but very few of the Catholic theologians
of this country have taken them seriously.

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DONALD J. KEEFE,

S. J.

If the basis of doing theology is then to be neither an
omnicompetent methodology of criticism nor an unwitting obedience to tradition, the question of its justification is not thereby avoided. Again, we cannot begin by presupposing the
familiar dichotomies of an autonomous criticism; it is not
by solving these that theology proceeds, but by affirming at
the outset that their merely potential implications are undone
by the actuality of the Truth. They are transcended and
negated by the presence of Christ in his Church. It is this
presence, radically liturgical and Eucharistic, that is the prius
of all theology. The actual meaning of reality, its sacramental
meaning, is disclosed in the Church's worship of the Risen Lord,
in the Eucharistic celebration of the sacrifice by which the
Church is caused, created. 7 To participate in this worship is
to participate in all that it grounds; i. e., it is to participate in
reality, in the Good Creation which it celebrates.
Part of this worship is intellectual, a continuing effort by the
individual Christian to enter more deeply into the Truth which
is there present as the sustenance of his understanding. This
effort finds a partial expression in theology, the theoretical
formulation of the quaerens of the faith. Such formulations have
no autonomous value: their truth is that of questions, directed
to the faith of the Church. This demands that the theologian
sufficiently understand his question so as to be able to frame it
with the precision and coherence of a methodologically controlled inquiry: the range of such inquiry is as. broad as the
faith itself-nothing human is alien to it, including the philosophy of history, for when turned to the uses of Christian
worship, this science undertakes the systematic analysis of the
sacramental significance of fallen temporal existence.
That our existence is thus significant is a matter of faith, a
historical consciousness inseparable from the Eucharistic worship
of the Lord of history. This notion of existence, this historical
consciousness, has the concreteness of the liturgy in which it is
discovered; it transcends the tools of the systematic theology
7

I Cor 10: 17; Lumen Gentium, n. 7.

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of history as actuality transcends possibility, as reality transcends abstractions, as the faith transcends its own quaerens
intellectum .. And yet it is indissociable from the qtui.erens, and
consequently is open to and compatible with the entire sweep
of critical inquiry for so long as that inquiry respects the
primacy in truth of the Revelation received in the Church as the
cause of faith and of existence in the history which is the Lord's.
Thus alone is history truly a theological discipline. 8
Those who accept the legitimacy of this endeavor are those
already in some manner involved in it: these, as worshipers,
form the theological and hermeneutical circle in which the
concrete project of theology proceeds.
It is within this circle that the theologian finds the concrete a
priori conditions of doing theology: the conditions, not of
its possibility, but of its actuality; these cannot be identified,
save at the cost of identifying the hypothetical theological
construct, i. e., the theological system, with the transcendent
reality toward whose truth the theological system is related as a
question, as a possible truth which is methodologically forbidden
to confuse its possibility with the actuality, the Revelation
received in the Church.
8 David Tracy's
much discussed 'revisionist' approach to fundamental theology,
elaborated in Blessed Rage for Order: Tlw New Pluralism in Theology, Seabury
Press, New York, 1975, would regard this inner-historical, because inner-traditional,
theological hermeneutic as either an obsolete fundamentalist orthodoxy (24-25)
or as a failure adequately t-0 " harmonize without conflating " faith and reason,
a task which he thinks proper to any contemporary fundamental theology; see
his "Religious Language as Limit Language," Theology Digest, vol. 22, (1974)
no. 4, 291-307, esp. 302. This task, as Tracy sees it, proceeds under criteria
which characterize a hermeneutical circle or community other than the community
which is the Church. The impact of this hermeneutical community upon the
Church's doctrinal traditions amounts to the 'revision' of that tradition. Avery
Dulles ("Method in Fundamental Theology: Reflections on David Tracy's
Blessed Rage for Order," Theological Studies, vol. 37, (1976) no. 2, 304-316)
and Peter Berger (" S2cular Theology and the Rejection of the Supernatural:
Reflections on Recent Trends," Theological Studies, vol. 38, (1977) no. I, 38-56),
have been sharply critical of the secularizing thrust of Tracy's method, Berger
going so far as to term it a reductionism. For a reply to this severity, see the
"Responses to Peter Berger," by Langdon Gilkey, Schubert Ogden and David
Tracy in Theological Studies, vol. 39 (1978), no. 3, 486-507.

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DONALD J, KEEFE, S. J,

Thus the theologian finds the conditions necessary for the
work of theology in and by his participation in them; his actual
relation to the community composing the theological circle
is constitutive for his theological understanding.
If he is
engaged in the specifically Catholic task of Catholic theology,
i. e., of sacramental theology, he cannot but accept the prior
sacramentality of the theological-hermeneutical circle, his community of sacramental worship, for this is the prius of the
sacramentality which he would understand.
But the hermeneutical circle, the a priori of the individual
understanding, is equally the prius of the individual's historical
and social existence; his truth is historical-traditional as well as
it is social-communal. To recognize this can easily be made to
be the first step in the reduction of this prius, the hermeneuticalcommunal-historical circle, to an abstraction, to a theory or
methodology: in short, to an ideology, which would then
function as the absolute transcendent to all the categories by
which the concrete reality may be designated: history, society,
being, truth. The self-stultification of such programs has
never been able to discourage their enthusiasts, but their antihistorical thrust is generally recognized; quite evidently, they
cannot serve the historical interest of Catholic theology, whose
concrete Absolute, Jesus the Christ, transcends history not as
an ideal abstracted from history, but only as immanent in
history-and in history which is itself no abstraction, but the
living community of worship, the Church, in and by whose
worship the hermeneutical community subsists. For such a
Catholic theology, history is time concretely qualified by the
immanence of Christ, by the worship of the Church. This
intrinsic qualification is simply freedom: by existence in Christ,
the worshipper is removed from the fatal, futile insignificance
of unqualified temporal duration, the ' sorrowful wheel ' of
pagan pessimism, the ' bad infinity ' of post-Hegelian philosophy. Thus qualified, history is not other than eschatologically
significant temporal existence, the temporal dimension of the
fallen creation and therefore the temporal dimension of the
hermeneutical circle, of the community of worship. Otherwise

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put, the heremeneutical circle is salvation-historical: it implies
a tradition in which one stands in order to understand that
the creation is good, however fallen, and that one exists in an
order of eschatological significance, in a sacramental order. 9
The recognition that one stands in such a tradition, in such
a circle, is inseparable from the recognition that one need not;
the sacramentality of reality, of the good creation, is not a
necessity of thought, but a free option, taken up within an
existential experience or intuition of freedom and of personal
significance-an experience, in short, of existing within a good
creation which is at once history, community, and world. This
is the experience of worship, sustained only by worship, of the
Emmanuel, the Lord Who is with us, in His world.
The freedom of this commitment to tradition, to history, to
worship, resists all rational analysis; it is gratuitous, with a
gratuity which pervades existence, whether of the self, of the
entirety of the good creation, or of the hermeneutical tradition
in which the truth of this worship, of this existence, of this
community, is given continual historical utterance in
liturgy. And while the alternative to such freedom is necessity
and determination, and while one is always conscious within
the circle of worship of that alternative as a temptation, it has
• H. G. Gadamer, Truth and Method, Seabury Press, New York 1975, refers the
historicity of truth to tradition (259 ff.) and tradition to the event-character
of language (379). This historicity is intended to be highly concrete: it is
legal, moral, ultimately theological, a fusion of the tradition presented in a document with the horizon of the interpreter of the document. But Gadamer's theological hermeneu.tic, like Ebeling's npon which it depends, is that of the Reformation; it is a liturgical hermeneutic, but it is one tied to a liturgy of word rather
than of sacrament (274 fl'., 294 ff.) and consequently rejects the normative value
of the historical tradition of the Church community. The attempt to identify
language instead of the Church as the vehicle of historical tradition (345 ff.)
fails, for it ignores the fact of what Orwell called " double-speak; " a common
language does not imply a human community in tradition, i. e., a hermeneutical
consensus. It then becomes necessary to look beyond language for the carrier
of historical reality or tradition, and one is thrown back upon a choice between
the dehistoricized faith of Scheiermacher in which the word has no indispensable
concrete content, and. the concreteness of a tradition whose liturgical character
is historical with the historicity of the Eucharistic event. This last is the
Catholic option: cf. Sacrosanctum Concilium, n. 2, 7.

868

DONALD J. KEEFE,

S. J.

there only the negative reality of a temptation, of a possibility
which cannot be made actual within that circle: to realize that
possibility is to depart from the circle which experiences in
worship the goodness of creation and the freedom of historical
existence.
For the alternative to existence in the good creation, in the
history of salvation, is not existence in some other and secular
realm of being and history, but is rather that aversio a D'eo
whose other face is an idolatry, an existential commitment to
the void, the absence of the good creation which is nothingness.
For we have no basis for the excogitation of a world which
God did not make good; the supposition that merely logical
possibilities, formed after the false image of our autonomous
reason, are in fact ontologically actual or creatable is entirely
without theological warrant. The non-necessity or gratuity
of our sacramental existence cannot be the justification for any
postulate of a non-gratuitous truth or history or being: these
are all appropriated in gratuitous freedom, or not at all. There
is then no basis for the notion, time-honored in Catholic theology, of a 'double gratuity,' the one of nature, the other of
grace: the ex nihilo of creation in Christ is precisely the ex
nihilo of gratia Christi, the Gift of the Spirit which is the purpose of the Father's sending of the Son, and which is inseparable
from the Incarnation as it is from the Eucharistic worship of
the Church.
The refusal to be free is then the refusal of the good creation;
as an ontological refusal, it tends not to a real existence in an
alternative and necessitarian reality, but to annihilation. This
tendency is innate in our humanity; it is a primordial datum
of our consciousness. Opposing it and irreconciliable with it is
another tendency, equally primordial, toward the personal
appropriation of the good creation and of the history of salvation. Any rationalization of this bifurcate consciousness
concludes to its disintegration; in this fallen world, only the
optimism of faith in the Lord of history can found the sacramental hermeneutic of the good creation, in which all the
dichotomies which our fallenness can fashion are overcome in

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369

the mystery of the Word made flesh, the Eucharistic sustenance
of our history, of our existence in Christ, of our reality redeemed.
This mystery is then the a priori of our humanity; our reality,
our truth, our history are unified in Him in whom we exist,
from whom we have fallen, in whom we are redeemed, the
Creator immanent in His creation. Whether we theologize with
insights drawn from anthropology, psychology, sociology, historical and literary criticism, law, ontology, or whatever other
heuristic device, it is with this creation, specified and qualified
as in Christo, that we are concerned, for there is no other. Its
humanity, its historicity, its freedom, as its unity, truth and
goodness, are not other than its relation to Him whom the
Father sent to give the Spirit. This relation is that of total,
absolute ontological dependence.
Sacramental theology is then the theology of creation in
Christ. It requires that the prime fact of our absolute dependence upon the Son's immanence in His creation as its intrinsic
formal and existential cause be the objective ground of all
our theological hypotheses, and so of all theological systematization. Only thus may the ancient contradictions immanent in the classical theological problematic, the rational
opposition of nature-grace, God-man, history-Kingdom, lawGospel and all the rest be resolved, not by yet another flawed
discovery of the autonomous mind, but concretely in Him by
whom these dichotomies and their attendant pessimism are
shown, revealed, to be false to the transcendent and yet immanent Truth of Good Creation, however native to our fallenness.
To accept this Truth is to turn away from the false autonomy
of our scientific methodologies, to convert them from their
own futile immanence of autonomous rationality to an openness
upon the Mystery which they cannot control, but from which
they may continually learn. With this conversion to the real,
they become theologies.
So to understand the theological task is to refuse at its outset all of those a priori mindsets which presume to transcend
the Revelation by enclosing its mystery within their own
necessities whether as ontologies, as historical methods, as

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DONALD J. KEEFE, S. J.

sociologies, as hermeneutical systems, or whatever. So to understand theology is to accept the truly theological a priori of the
Church's worship, whose transcendence cannot be understood
apart from one's immanence within it. This transcendence is
not abstract; it has the concreteness of the One Flesh of the
Eucharist, the creative and redemptive relation of Jesus to His
Body, the Church. In this relation, all reality, however
designated, subsists. 10 As this concrete relation is the focus
of all Catholic worship, so it must be the focus of that element
of the Church's worship which is theology. In this worship,
all that is human is sustained and directed toward its eschatological fulfillment; by this worship, the Spirit of freedom is
given, the gift of historical existence in Christo. History has no
other formality than this, no other dynamism, and no :finality
other than the mystery of the Kingdom. Historical consciousness, ontological realism and sacramental worship are at one
with this existence in Christ, and cannot be isolated from it:
the event of the Eucharist and the event of the Gift of the
Creator Spiritus are inseparable. This is the event of creation
in Christ, at once historical, ontological, and sacramental.
From this viewpoint, sacramental efficacy is in the order of
substance, i. e., of creation, not of some less total kind of
change or accidental transformation. This interpretation of the
Tridentine ex opere operato doctrine is equivalent to an identification of the sacramental event ex opere operato with the event
which is creation in Christ--or creation tout court. Inasmuch
as the sacramental event par excellence is that which Trent
has called transubstantiation, it is then necessary to frame
a single systematic account at once of the Eucharist and of
creation. Such an account, as an ontology, cannot be charged
with nonhistoricity; neither is it burdened with any naive
10 This term, used by Vatican II
(Lumen Gentium, n. 8) to describe the
dependence of the " Church of Christ " upon the Roman Catholic Church, also
states the dependence of creation upon the immanence within it of the Creator
Christ, whose Mission from the Father is His presence among us. That presence
is Eucharistic; it is liturgical and historical. Its Truth is normative for that
creation's history.

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871

cosmological or anthropological presupposition inconsistent
with the theme of creation in Christ. The entire transposition
of the classical theological problem which this approach represents rests upon a single systematic postulate: the ontological
identity of all contingency ex nihilo, whether it be thought of as
creation or as gratia Christi. By this postulate, the last remnants of the nominalist dichotomy between nature and grace
are rejected by the reduction of nature to a pure possibility of
thought, whose intrinsic necessity removes it from all substantial contingency, i. e., from creation. There is here no
' Christomonism,' for the project intends no more than a
coherent and orthodox theology of the Father's sending of
the Son to give the Spirit, and the primary causality inherent in
that Mission, to which the expression" creation in Christ" is a
pointer, does not derogate from but in fact creates and sustains
the secondary and sacramental efficacy of all human agency,
whose ground and culmination is the worship of the Church.
DONALD

Marquette University
Milwaukee, Wisconsin

J. KEEFE,

s. J.

SENSIBILITY IN
RAHNER AND MERLEAU-PONTY

T

HE PHILOSOPHICAL PROJECTS of Karl Rahner
and Maurice Merleau-Ponty are similar in that both
take human cognition to be the clue to the structure
of human existence, and take human existence to be the chief
clue to the understanding of the world. Rahner's Spirit in the
World is a metaphysics of knowledge in which the dynamics of
human cognition is the clue to the meaning of reality. MerleauPonty' s Phenomenology of Perception is a work in which perception is revealed to be the basic dynamism of human existence.
Key to the understanding of Karl Rahner is the comprehension of the nature and operation of sensibility in his work, as
inherited by him from Thomas Aquinas. Key to the comprehension of Merleau-Ponty is the understanding of perception
as the basis of man's cognition and motor activity, his access to
the visible, and, through the visible, to the invisible. It is
the thesis of this article that the understanding of certain areas
in either of these thinkers will illuminate parallel areas in the
work of the other. Work done by Merleau-Ponty can be used
in support of Rahner, and vice versa. Thomistic metaphysics
finds sympathy in phenomenological ontology.
In the philosophy of Karl Rahner sensibility is part of the
ontological structure of the person, a condition essential to the
definition of the human. It refers to all that is material in man,
in so far as it originates in and is informed by man's spirit.
Without spirit, matter does not achieve sensibility. Sensibility
refers to the incarnation of spirit in matter, an incarnation that
makes the body a person and its material surroundings a world.
The spirit gives rise to sensibility. By a process called emanation,1 the spirit becomes other than itself without ceasing to be
1

Karl Rahner, Spirit in the World (New York: Herder and Herder, 1968), p. 254.

372

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IN HAHNER AND MERLEAU-PONTY

373

itself, and identifies this otherness with itself. The otherness
generated by finite spirit is matter, and spirit flows through its
material otherness as sensibility. Sensibility is an important
notion in philosophical anthropology, necessary to the theory
of knowledge, in which it is referred to as sensation.
Sensation is not one kind of human knowing, nor is it an early
phase dispensed with and departed from in the later phases;
it is part of all human knowing. It has to do with spirit's pouring out of itself into matter, its own matter, as the condition in
which extraneous forms can imprint themselves on this matter.
From this spirit can later abstract the form, know it as a
universal, and refer it back to its particular extraneous source
in a judgment. 2
Purely spiritual knowledge would be the intellectual knowledge of the abstracted form as universal. But this spiritual
knowledge is immediately referred to the material phantasm
from which it arises (conversion to the phantasm) ,3 and it is
further referred through the phantasm to the particular being
experienced (judgment). Man does not have any knowledge
that does not come from sensation, which is not referred to a
phantasm, which is not at least implied in a judgment. His
knowledge and his being are so much the same that any discussion of his knowledge is also one about his nature.
Man is a material being, by nature an incarnation of spirit in
matter. Spirit is an unrestricted desire to know, and since its
natural desire for ever more being and truth is suspended in
matter, spirit immerses itself in matter, loses itself there in sensation, and then overcomes this absence from itself by a return
to itself.4 Only upon its self-retrieval does it enjoy presence
to itself. Man's presence to himself is a mediated immediacy
in which it is necessary for him to know another in order to
appreciate the truth of his own being.
Louis Roberts indicates three levels of knowledge in Rahner, 5
Ibid., p. U5.
Ibid., p. £38.
•Ibid., p. 117.

2

3

6 Louis Roberts,
The Achievement
Herder, 1967), p. £5.

of Karl Rahner (New York: Herder and

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ROBERT E. DOUD

which he refers to as a "transcendental dialectic: " (1) sensation-the praesentia mundi; (2) knowing as thought---oppositio mundi; (3) knowing in its unity-conversio ad phantasma.
These three-sensation, abstraction and conversion-are all
phases of one knowing process, and even as such are completed
as a knowing process only in the judgment, which bridges the
intentional gap to the existing thing known. 6
All knowledge begins as intuition. In intuition the object and
the subject perform a single act. The subject enacts the act
of the object as its own act. One act of knowing is supported by
both subject and object: 7 " the act of the sensed object takes
place in the matter of the sensing subject." The object is the
cause of the knowing, because it impresses its form on the
matter of the subject. The subject is cause of the knowing,
because, as spirit, it sustains its own emanation receptively
through the matter.
While intuiting, the subject pours itself into the otherness of
its matter, becoming absent to itself, losing itself, being given
over to the other, not being able to distinguish itself from the
other. Following intuition and the suspension of spirit in
matter comes objectification, in which the subject knows the
other as other and knows itself apart from the other. This is
the intellectual moment, transcending sensation, attaining to
the knowledge of the universal. Sense intuits and intellect
objectifies.
After intuition and objectification follows conversion to the
phantasm. Here the intellect realizes that its activity is always
an illumination of a sensible species, always referred to matter,
to sensibility, to the world. In virtue of this it experiences its
concept only in reference to a percept. Knowledge is incarnational in structure because man himself is incarnational in
structure.
• Ibid., p. !?8.
7 Andrew Tallon, "Rahner
and Personization," Philosophy Today 14 (1970),
p. 48, and "Personal Becoming," The Thomis.t 43 (1979), p. 28, and James J.
Condon, "Karl Rahner on Sensation," The Thom-ist 41 (1977), pp. 415-6.
8 Spirit in the World, p. liii.

SENSIBILITY

IN RAUNER AND MERLEAU-PONTY

375

Rahner explains that conversion to the phantasm designates
the unity of aU man's cognitive powers in the act of knowing.
It integrates the knowledge of intellect, imagination and the
several senses. It integrates perception and conception and
prepares for judgment. It is through the phantasm that knowledge terminates realistically in the thing known.
The importance of sensibility in Rahner does not cease with
cognition, but it reaches to conation or appetition as well. This
we find in his theological work on the question of concupiscence. 9
Here Rahner reminds us that we can never have an act of
spiritual cognition that is not an act of sensitive cognition, and
conversely. 10 Man's desires have the same structure as his perceptions. Concupiscence is nothing but man's condition of
sensibility considered on the level of conation.
In the question of knowing himself, man finds that his materiality is not transparent in its entirety. His presence to himself
is never a complete recovery from the suspension of self in
otherness. His self-enactment, or presence to himself, is always
less than all it could be. Something of his selfhood goes unrecovered due to the viscosity and opaqueness of matter.
So, in the question of conation, there is only an incomplete
domination of the reason over the sense as the various powers
into which sensibility is divided. The senses are faculties of
cognition and of appetition. Concupiscence is their tendency
to move into action independently of the control of reason.
The spirit that emanates through matter as sensibility only
partially retrieves itself as self-presence, and this has its
appetitive correlative in the lack of domination had by rational
will over the senses.
Rahner goes to great length to explain that concupiscence
is a part of the natural dynamism of man, and is not most
basically a tendency to sin. Only in its narrowest sense is" evil
concupiscence" a tendency to sin. This narrowest sense refers
to the condition of resistance of the powers to the will, even
9 Rahner, Theological Investigations I, translated
by Cornelius Ernst (Baltimore:
Helicon, 1961), pp. 347-382.
10 Ibid., p. 352.

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ROBERT E. DOUD

after the dictate and decision of universal reason to the contrary.11
In the narrowest, and properly theological sense concupiscence is the tension between person and nature, between man
as decider and his various natural orientations, which precede
his decisions. When he makes a decision, the severalness of his
conative orientations does not automatically disappear, but
resists the decision, making it impossible for him fully to penetrate his own nature with his person. Man's objective nature
has its own inertia, and is only partially directed by his personal
decisions. 12
In the widest sense, concupiscence is any conscious reactive
attitude developed by a power, as opposed to a receptive or
cognitive attitude. 13 It is the general human condition, morally
neutral, of sensibility as the emanation and suspension of spirit
in matter, without the actuality of complete self-retrieval and
perfect luminosity. The reason none of us knows himself
perfectly is the same as the reason none of us can perfectly
fulfill the commitments of our will. l_;here is a certain sluggishness of spirit due to its incarnation in matter. This is part
of man's nature previous to and apart from all discussion of his
actual sinfulness.
Divided into the several senses, human appetition is manyfaceted and multi-directional. In their independence each pulls
against the other and all pull against the rational appetite.
This prevents us from ever putting ourselves fully into any
decision. We cannot help holding back, retaining energy, remaining shy of total self-expenditure in any single commitment,
be it good or bad. Concupiscence is the habitual ability of the
sensitized appetite to move into act independently of and even
in resistance to the control of free personal decision. 14
As concupiscence, sensibility works both for us and against
us. It does. not allow us to give ourselves totally in any comIbid., p. 860.
Ibid., p. 860-9.
13 Ibid., p. 858.

11
12

"Conan Gallagher,

"Concupiscence,"

The Thomist XXX (1966), p. fl58.

SENSIBILITY

IN RAHNER AND MERLEAU-PONTY

377

mitmeut, so that we can never do a totally good deed with total
self-donation to the task, but neither can we ever perform a
totally selfish or dastardly act. Only in death, with the
opportunity for total freedom it brings can we totally penetrate
our natures, both making and executing a total and perfect
option. 15 In death's decision alone we leave our sluggish concupiscence behind and penetrate our natures totally with complete personal self-enactment. 16
Spirit is a capacity to know all things, and this emanates as
an insatiable curiosity in sensibility. Seen from the aspect of
the appetitive, this explains the unquenchability of concupiscence. Man aches for an act in which he can totally enact
himself as a person, but also aches for a mode of acquisition in
which all the world, all experience, can he his.
Without compromising the primacy and ultimacy of the
existential judgment in human cognition, 17 Rahner displays
great interest in the question as a chronic condition moving us
from judgment to judgment. The question is the cognitive
mode for man's natural dynamism, a dynamism which is
only to rest in possession of the infinite, a capacity only to be
filled in a mode of possession which nature cannot fulfill. This
unrest, this " obediential capacity " for something beyond
nature, explains how man's judgments satisfy him only in a
provisional way, and always leave him thirsting for more. In
the judgment he attains to being, but this relative attainment
of being only makes him feel all the more his capacity for an
absolute attainment. This drive for more knowledge explains
man's questioning; it is a drive for more being.
Spirit is the name for the power in man that reaches beyond
all finite manifestations for being itself. It is a grasping movement that reaches beyond the physical, visible world. Even so,
15 Rahner,
On the Theology of Death (New York: Herder and Herder, 1961),
pp. 88-9.
16 Theological Investigations I, p. 282.
17 Frederick Wilhelmsen, " The Priority of Judgment over Question: Reflections
on Transcendental Thomism," International Philosophical Quarterly 14 (1974), pp.
481-2.

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ROBERT E. DOUD

as spirit-in-the-world, it is through the world and its materiality
that spirit grapples its way to the beyond. Spirit is drive or
appetite for being as such; it is the capacity to know being as
such, lured along by a " pre-grasp " of that to which it is
drawn. Spirit is doubly oriented to Absolute Being and to the
world in which it experiences the plurality of other beings and
its own solidarity with other finite beings.
The dynamism of spirit is the root of the dynamism of matter
as sensibility. Sensibility is concupiscent, because, spirit,
oriented to the world, is never fulfilled with its finite intramundane experiences o.f living and being. The restlessness
of spirit lies beyond the insatiability of the flesh. It is not a battle
between spirit and flesh, but the struggle of one being who
is both, trying to recover, unify and totalize himself, while
spirit is diffused through matter, the very condition that makes
his self-expression and self-enactment possible.
Sensibility, then, reveals a capacity for the infinite which
carries out its searching in the world, through matter, as a sensitized primordial desire which is split up into the desires of the
several senses. Sensibility is sensuality, the need of the senses
for the pleasure of acquisition, with the constant let-down of
not having acquired enough, of having over-indulged, or of
feeling a deeper need in contrariety to a fulfilled superficial
need. It is also ambiguously open to further, higher meanings
which can be pursued as incarnated or symbolized in matter.
Having sketched out a summary of Rahner's positions on
sensibility, I will now lay out a sketch summarizing MerleauPonty's positions on sensibility. These two sketches will be
roughly parallel in development. I will closely correlate spiritin-the-world with being-in-the-flesh (hyphenation is mine),
concupiscence and motility, conversion to the phantasm and
perception in the rich Merleau-Pontian sense.
In a discussion of Merleau-Ponty's notion oi sensibility, it is
most helpful to point out that for him sensibility and visibility
are the same thing. The terms visibility and invisibility correlate exactly with the less frequent sensibility and insensibility. It is also helpful to point out that the body is that

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IN HAHNER AND MERLEAU-PONTY

379

aspect of man which is visible, but that the body is the incarnation of consciousness, which is invisible. To speak of man
and his world we must speak about the visible and the invisible,
the sensible and that which cannot be sensed, but which nevertheless comes to be known through the sensible.
On the cognitive level, sensibility manifests itself as perception. Perception embraces the relationship between the
incarnate cogito and the entire world as the horizon of its
experience,18 against which particular objects appear. Perception includes aspects of the world that are visible, and those
that have to do not with manifestation but with meaning, and
that are therefore invisible. The network of filigrees interlacing body and world is never completely visible, but its
invisible presence conditions what is visible.
The intentionality between body and world is not purely
cognitive, of course, but is appetitive as well. This MerleauPonty expresses in his notion of motility. 19 Motility, or motor
intentionality, is equiprimordial with perception. We never
simply perceive an object, but we take up an attitude toward it,
reacting to it in some way, construing it as obstacle or
opportunity. As we perceive things, we inchoately judge what
to do with them, how to use them. They are there for our
enjoyment or employment; they are deployed for our use.
Motility means bodily action. It is the spontaneous movement of the body in reaction to perceptual meanings. It is
pre-personal, pre-rational and pre-reflective, and may move
into action independently and in advance of the reflective
powers. The reflective powers sculpture the body's motility
into desirable patterns or habits. Undesirable habits may be
extremely difficult to remove, showing that the body has a
motile-perceptual inertia at the pre-rational level.
Motility and spatiality are closely connected. The body
sets itself up as a center of orientation for motor activity.
18 Maurice
Merleau-Ponty, The Phenom.enology of Perception, translated by
Colin Smith (New York: The Humanities Press, 1970), p. xiii.
19 John
Bannan, The Philosophy of Merleau-Pon"ty (New York: Harcourt,
Brace and World Inc., 1967), p. 70.

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ROBERT E. DOUD

Objects surrounding it become tools for its motor projects.
Meanings arise on the perceptual level with a motor significance.
The body's space is never originally an "objective space" of
distances between objects among which the body is an unprivileged example. The body's space is a "phenomenal space"
or a " lived space " from which it deploys itself and employs
other objects for its own motor purposes. 20
Motility is rooted in basic intentionality, or "operative intentionality."
Merleau-Ponty refers to it as "beneath intelligence," and even as "beneath perception." As such, intentionality is an " intentional arc," " a vector mobile in all
directions like a searchlight." It is this arc which brings about
"the unity of the senses, of intelligence, of sensibility and
motility." It is a "projective activity" which uses the objects
around it as " springboards from which to leap towards other
spontaneous acts." 21
On top of this basic operative intentionality, 22 there is a" thetic intentionality," which operates on the rational level, generating more meaning from meanings which are originally given
at the level of perception and motor intentionality.
Meaning
does not originate with reason and reflection, but these carry
forward a process already initiated on a more fundamental level.
Reflective activity is always incarnate in and referred to perception: knowledge is basically one, and reasoning is never a
permanent departure from perceiving.
Intentionality is never a purely intellectual process, but is
oriented to operation as well as to cognition, carrying with it the
operative tendencies and dynamisms to enlist for its own
projects the objects it perceives. The world and its contents,
although they offer resistance to the projects of the body, are
also unfinished realities, requiring human presence to bring
them to completion.
The world has more meaning, and so do its contents, than it
ever reveals in one experience. The invisible side of man has
20

The Phenomenofogy of Perc:eption, pp. 105ff.

lbid., pp. 135-6.
22 Ibid., p. 429.
21

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IN HAHNER AND MERLEAU-PONTY

381

more meaning than it is ever able to represent completely in
his visibility. These conditions help constitute the ambiguity
of the world, the condition by which it supports many interpretations, none of which are ultimate or irreplaceable. Life
is full of meaning-we are condemned to meaning, says Merleau-Ponty-but no meaning for any single experience reigns
supreme with everlasting tenure over all the others.
Ambiguity is closely allied with sensibility, because it is the
condition by which man's identity may be reduced neither to
his consciousness nor to his body. It is also the condition by
which the world is irreducible to any set of fixed or finished
significanoes. 23 The openness of everything, of subject and
object, to further meaning and interpretation is ambiguity, and
ambiguity is due to an invisibility structuring visibility from
within, never exhausting itself in any particular manifestations.
The essences of all things are incarnate in their manif estations. 24 .Man's consciousness is embodied in his flesh. Being
is incarnated in its expressions. Silence is enfleshed in speech,
but not exhausted there; experience is so related to language,
inexhaustible and not whoily discharged into any of its descriptions. The tension of the visible and the invisible, neither
wholly reducible to the other, yet neither available without the
other, structures Merleau-Ponty's systematic approach to many
problems; this incarnational and organic approach uses man's
perceptual structure as a model for understanding all cultural
realities.
The ambiguity of the body rests in the fact that it is the
percipient of the world, and it is at the same time perceived by
others. It is both subject and object. When I touch one hand
with the other, I am both touching myself and being touched,
and these two operations never wholly melt into one another. 25
It is this ambiguous subject-object relation that I am perceptuBannan, pp. 78-80.
•• Ibid., p. 154.
25 Merleau-Ponty,
The Visible and the Invisible, edition by Claude Lafort and
translated by Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968),
p. 254.
23

382

ROBERT E. DOUD

ally to myself that serves as the ground for all other experiences
in which I am subject and others are objects. It prepares me
to suspect subjectivity in other objects like myself. This
suspicion, untouchable and invisible, makes me capable of
interimbjectivity as intercorporeality.
My consciousness is incarnate in my body, and my body in
turn is incarnate in the world. There is one " flesh of the
world," 26 one sensibility shared by both me and the world. To
myself I am a privileged zone of this sensible and sensing flesh,
but I can also understand perceptually how to others I am the
sensed. The non-sentient but sensible world has as its inner
invisibility Being. Being is the ultimate invisible, the inner to
which the flesh of the world is the outer dimension.
Being is ever incarnate; it embraces both the visible and the
invisible. " As an expanse of meaning, Being consequently is
both visible and invisible, the strands of sense that run from
being to being and render them visible and expressive. The
stance of being is that of a question: in their visibility and in
their expressive character, things ask of the eye and hand what
can be seen and touched, and of language what can be said." 27
Behind the essences and expressions of the sensible which the
world ministers to as horizon and context, there is a higher
solidarity, the solidarity of being. Originally raw and unposited, being, as first discovered by Merleau-Ponty, is a presence or a within of the objects manifesting themselves. Slowly
he lets it dawn on him that the being showing itself through
objects is the same being that makes him a sensible in the
world. Now being is brought with essences to the level of the
reflective consciousness, and a phenomenological ontology is
achieved.
The invisible operates in Merleau-Ponty on two levels. First
is the level of pereption itself, the level in which each object is
invisibly interwoven with the world and with other things, with
hidden textures and latent lines,. rays and filigrees. Second there
•• lbUl., p. 248 and p. 255.
••Garth Gillan, The Horizons af the Flesh (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1973), p. !W.

SENSIBILITY

IN HAHNER AND MERLEAU-PONTY

383

is the level of thought, of mind and idea, which is incarnate in
perception, but which is more than perception; it is concerned
with truth and falsehood, fantasy and fact. The second level
requires the first, on which is already achieved a perceptual
faith in the objectivity of the world.
So, if sensibility is synonymous with visibility, Being embraces
both the visible and the invisible, and is responsible for the
movement of meaning between visibles and from the invisible
to the visible. Being is not to be had in any pure state, distilled
from its incarnation and pluralization in sensibility, yet it is
more than what is sensible, and embraces the insensible as well.
The world is a flesh and has organic unity, because of the
sustaining, self-manifesting and yet self-concealing, presence of
Being, incarnate within it.
It is Being that makes the sensible thinkable. " The essential
is to describe the vertical or wild Being as that pre-spiritual
milieu without which nothing is thinkable, not even the spirit,
and by which we pass into one another, and ourselves into
ourselves ... " 28 Being serves as a universal ground of meaning
and thought, and especially in thinking what are known as
essences.
In rational cognition the essence reaches out to consciousness
through one of its profiles, and the incarnate cogito, as a system
of equivalences for things, intuits. within its global act of
perceiving the essence as an intelligible minimum that " cannot
be varied without the object itself disappearing." There is
no divorce of essence from fact; the knowledge of one always
entails the knowledge of the other. 29
" There are not two knowledges, but two different degrees of
elaboration of the same knowledge." Essence is always incarnate in fact and thought is always incarnate in words. An object
is always perceived in the cultural world with reference to
certain words, relating to the languages one speaks. This
"verbalized object" 30 is what we perceive. Words possess a
•• Ibid., p. 22.
••Bannan, pp. 152-3.
ao Ibid., p. 156.

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ROBERT E. DOUD

certain generality which allows them to be applied to similar
objects. He describes words as" emotional essences" that have
become generalized or detached from their" empirical origins."
Thought is the selective applying of certain words to certain
facts. There is no thought that is utterly detached from words. 31
The human world, the social world, the world of language and
of culture contain the same question as the question of thought:
essence and fact,. the general in the particular. In the human
world it is a question of communication and solitude, presence
to others and presence to oneself. Neither is the more basic;
both are equally original. There is a pouring out of the self
into otherness, and a withdrawal of the self into itself and away
from its engagements. I give myself over to the generality
of my worldly situation, and again I recoil into the particularity
of my inalienable presence to myself.
Words and gestures are behaviors which symbolize essences
and meanings. They are material embodiments of meaning,
available for communication in the social world. There would
be no thinking without this prior symbol-making activity
which is equiprimordial with perception and intersubjectivity.
The succession of symbols, verbal and otherwise, build up as a
sediment into a cultural world which conditions all of our
experiences. The flesh of the world is not experienced as raw,
brutal and undisciplined, but is pre-constituted by a host of
sedimented cultural meanings. It is not up to each of us to
invent language anew, but to learn the accumulated social
meaning of words. Even so, such spoken language must give
way to new applications in actual speech, which is the spontaneous completion of experience by verbalization in symbols. For
Merleau-Ponty, learning to think is learning to use words both
correctly and creatively.
Reflection has a temporal structure. I reflect on a past event,
perceiving its meaning differently than I did then. I explain an
earlier statement of mine. I begin to question facts or interpretations I had not previously questioned. It is my absence
•1

Ibid., pp. 156-7.

SENSIBILITY

IN RAHNER AND MERLEAU-PONTY

885

or remoteness from a situation, due to the passing of time,
that gives me the distance to perceive it anew, change my perspective, interpret in light of the comments of others, and therefore, more objectively. The mind in its temporal reflectiveness
is basically interrogative. Every present judgment gives way
to a future of reappraisal, a new absence in which new judgments may be formed. The discovery of the importance of the
absence between presences coincides with the exaltation of the
interrogative.
Perception, according to Merleau-Ponty, is not simply a prereflective grasp of meanings on the part of a conscious body in
the world, but it is a commitment on the part of a body to a
world which is only partly given, and which must be brought
to completion by the body's own activity. Sensibility, then,
is not a merely passive and receptive condition, but is such
only as a quality of a world in which there are conscious
bodies, the passive moment of an active and spontaneous initiative sharing one flesh with other bodies and objects in the
world.
Sensibility is for action, for motion, for commitment. In it
the body is given over to the world, and given over to itself
objectively as a part of the world. It is materiality as infused
with consciousness, and brute matter as waiting to be completed
in the projects of surrounding bodies. It is a common tissue of
worldliness through which empathies compenetrate and constitute one another, a single organicity infused with the invisible
singleness of Being itself.
The coincidence of the visible and the invisible in a relationship of incarnation and the ambiguity of this coincidence allows
withdrawal
us to speak of an absence within a presence,
from the sensible fact to behold its essence, invisible and silent,
and immediately to express the essence in words alluding to it
but not exhausting its meaning. Just as no profile taxatively
expresses an object's essence, so, no word exactly strikes the
always somewhat tacit meaning it conveys. Such is the condition of sensibility, that which allows all perception and cognition
to take place, but which also sets up an ineradicable margin
of resistance between the visible and the invisible.

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ROBERT E. DOUD

An Integration of Rahner and M erleau-Ponty

In examining sensibility in these two thinkers, we are discussing matter on its highest level, on the level of its incorporation into the human organism. Matter at this. level,
however, reveals its potential at every level. The most trivial
puff of inorganic stuff has as its possibility, and perhaps as its
destiny, incorporation into a rationally sentient body. Truly,
there are things to be known about the matter of the universe
that can only be known by the study of human existence and
knowing. There is a completion that can be brought to matter
only as it becomes the tissue of a human organism.
The sensible or the visible includes for Merleau-Ponty all of
matter. The flesh of the world is matter. Sensibility is a property of the entire world; bodies are privileged zones in which
the flesh is sentient as well as sensed. There is an insensible,
an invisible, an immaterial component shot through this flesh.
In the most general sense this component is Being itself. On
a less general scale it is the fabric of relationships and influences
among objects as they serve as a context for one another. On a
very particular scale in bodies, it is consciousness incarnate in
the flesh.
In Rahner's explanation of sensibility, cognition is described
as a three-phase operation (actually, four, if judgment is included). The first phase (sensation) and the third phase (conversion) involve sensibility. Merleau-Ponty does not divide
cognition into three or four phases, but he does describe the
tension of solitude and communication in ways that closely
parallel abstraction and sensibility in Rahner. The Frenchman's sensibility (visibility) would, as described, include the
German's sensation and conversion. Merleau-Ponty holds
sensation and conversion as one and describes abstraction or
derivation of the essence as a process totally incarnate in sensibility. It is the invisible actively embodied in the visible.
Motility and concupiscence make sense in the same way as
the dynamism or appetition of personal sensibility toward the
world and toward objects. They are grounded in a root

SENSIBILITY

IN RAHNER AND MERLEAU-PONTY

387

intentionality that gives an organism its outwardness and sense
of motor purpose. They enjoy the full scope of sensibility itself,
including a global orientation of body toward the world, and
particular projects involving both self-suspension in matter and
self-gratification, expressing a creativity and inventiveness in
the deployment of objects about itself to its own convenience
or advantage.
The distance between cogito and body, or between spirit and
sensibility, is most keenly felt when the personal and rational
powers direct the organism in one way and when the habits or
spontaneous inclinations incline the organism in another. This
inner dividedness or resistance of one zone of sensibility to the
general movement through the matter of the organism testifies
to the abiding ambiguity of that relationship called incarnation.
The unity of the organism, experienced even in dramatic
cases of concupiscent resistance to itself, is mirrored constantly
in its knowledge. Following the intellectual phase of abstraction in which the concept is derived, there is the conversion
to the phantasm. The phase of abstraction corresponds to the
person's solitude and incommunicability, and the phase of
conversion to his communication, a reaffirmation of sensibility
and ,a readiness for completion in judgment, following upon
a withdrawal into self-presence and abstraction.
The phantasm is never experienced in utter cognitive detachment, apart from desires and appetitions.
Emotional and
affective overtones accompany every phantasm. Perception
and the intellection embodied in it ramify immediately into
conation and concupiscence. Perception is pervaded by motility and sensibility is penetrated by concupiscence. Incarnate
in these is rational knowing and willing. Conflicts in appetition
and resistances to rational appetition are not struggles between
higher and lower, spirit and matter, but rather between diverse
regions within sensibility, all of which are shot through with
incarnate rationality.
In Karl Rahner, too, all of matter serves as an otherness for
spirit in a relationship called emanation. Most generally, God
is the spirit who freely communicates himself outside of him-

388

ROBERT E. DOUD

self without ceasing to be himself. God freely creates matter
as an otherness, which he sculptures into his own image and
likeness until he can in man communicate himself fully, become
incarnate in a single individual, but with wide ramifications for
all other persons and for all matter. The ultimate possibility
for matter, in virtue of the incarnation of God in Jesus, is to
become God.
This theologically incarnational structure and purpose of the
world is mirrored in the make-up of all human beings. Man,
finite and embodied spirit, is also related to matter by emanation. He, too, structurally and inevitably, pours himself out
into a condition of otherness in order to communicate with
the world, and then abstracts himself into a solitude of selfpresence, showing that his immanent uniqueness is never
relinquished, but only revealed as he enters into innerwordly
relationships. He is designed for self-donation to the world and
for self-possession in a reflective abstraction from it.
Being might be looked upon by the theologian as an anonymous designation of God as he creates, energizes and immanenizes himself within matter. To the theologian the world's
fabric might not be fl.esh in a merely figurative sense, but in
analogy to the way in which man is spirit-in-the-world, in an
aboriginal way detectable by the ontologist who is not also a
theologian, and by the philosopher who is not a believer.
If for Merleau-Ponty sensibility is extended from man's personalized matter to apply to all matter in the world, then for
Rahner matter is the flesh of God as well as the flesh of the
world. Matter is a visibility that serves as an otherness for
the ultimate invisible, the necessary condition for the ultimate
invisible, the necessary condition for the extension and communication of spirit outside itself, primordially so constituted
by God in creation, and secondarily so experienced by man
in derivative emanations.
For Rahner, the invisible which constitutes the visible from
within must accommodate the self-communication of the transcendent as well. There is no reason to believe that MerleauPonty forbids such an extension of the invisible, except that

SENSIBILITY

IN RAHNER AND MERLEAU-PONTY

389

he considers such an extension beyond the limits of philosophical reflection. For a Merleau-Pontian, Rahner's interpretation of matter and sensibility would have to be on this level
properly theological, and not a territory available to philosophy.
Both Rahner and Merleau-Ponty are interested in the unity
of man's knowing as perception and sensation, rather than in
the discrete operations of the several senses. Both are dedicated
to the unity of the sentient knower, and the unity of the sentient
body and the world which is a fleshy texture, known in much
the same way as the body knows its own flesh. For Rahner,
sensation is what Merleau-Ponty would call perception, the
global presence of the body in the world.
Rahner has gone so far as to indicate in his book On the
Theology of Death that the spirit of man retains its sensibility
even beyond death 32 in a " pan-cosmic " relation to the world.
John F. Bannan has shown how it is appropriate to refer to the
"primacy of the sensible" 33 in Merleau-Ponty.
Certainly,
there is no way to comprehend the meaning of man or of the
world without access to them through their own constitutive
sensibility, visibility and tangibility. For Rahner and Merleau-Ponty, there is no possible escape from the flesh to a
disembodied or disengaged mode of knowledge or existence.
ROBERT

University of La Verne
La Verne, Cdifornia

••Op. cit., p. 29.
33

Bannan, p. 260.

E. Doun

ECKHART'S CONDEMNATION RECONSIDERED

The basic documents of Eckhart's
following editions:

trial will be cited here according to the

A. Thery-Gabriel Thery, "Edition critique des pieces relatives au proces d'Eckhart
contenues dans le manuscript 33b de la Bibliotheque de Soest," Archivew
d'hist<Yire lifJteraire et doctrinale du moyen age l, (1926) ' lfl9-268.
B. Pelster-Franz Pelster, "Ein Gutachten aus dem Eckehart-Prozess in Avignon,"
Aus der Geisteswelt dew Mittelalters. Festgabe iVIartin Grabmann (Beitriige
Supplement III. Munster, 1935), 1099-1124.
C. Laurent-M.-H.
Laurent, "Autour du proces de Maitre Eckhart.
Les
documents des Archives Vaticanes," Divus Thomas (Piacenza), Ser. III, 18
(1936), 331-48, 430-47.

O

N MARCH 27, 1329, Pope John XXII issued the Bull
In agro dominfoo condemning twenty-eight propositions drawn from the works of Meister Eckhart as
either heretical or suspect of heresy. On April 15 he wrote
to Henry of Virneburg, the Archbishop of Cologne who had
begun the proceedings against Eckhart three years before,
ordering him to publicize the document in his diocese and
province so that " ... the hearts of the simple folk that are
easily led astray, especially those to whom Eckhart preached
these propositions while he was alive, may not be in any
way infected by the errors contained therein." 1 Six and a half
centuries have passed since Pope John's decisive move against
the German Dominican, but debates about the significance
of the condemnation have continued to the present day.
Over the centuries those who have seen Eckhart as a protoProtestant, a prophet of German national religion, a Zen Master
disguised as a Dominican, or anything other than what he really
was-a devout medieval Christian cleric-have taken at least
1 ••• ut per publicationem huiusmodi simplieium corda, qui faciliter seducuntur,
et maxime illi, quibus idem Ekardus, dum vixit, predictos articulos predicavit,
erroribus contentis in eis minime imbuantur (Laurent, 445) .

890

ECKHART'S CONDEMNATION

RECONSIDERED

391

delectatio moro8a in the condemnation's seeming support of
their positions. Eckhart's friends and defenders, in his day as
in ours, have been indignant, defensive, and frequently embarrassed over the condemnation. The variety of their interpretations is indication enough. Jeanne Ancelet-Hustache, for
instance, is content with trying to show that Eckhart gave a
rather good account of himself in the case of some of the
controversial items. 2 Alois Dempf prized Eckhart's written
Defense as a priceless "self-interpretation"
of the Meister's
thought, 3 while Josef Koch, whose account of the details of the
trial is by far the best available,4 thought that the inquisitors
both at Cologne and Avignon proceeded with admirable care
and the Meister did not understand what was going on and
botched his Defense quite badly. Such disagreement invites a
reconsideration, one that cannot pretend to have uncovered new
data, but that will rather attempt to suggest some new perspectives from which to view the evidence. The case will be
made in three stages: a review of the course of the two trials,
an analysis of the theological principles of Eskhart's Defense,
and an evaluation of the meaning of the final condemnation.
As in the case of so many other theological condemnations
of the middle ages, we know something about the trial of Eckhart, but not enough. The relevant documents have not yet
appeared in the critical edition of the Latin works; hence we
must depend upon earlier editions that have not been above
criticism. 5 Important documents have not survived, but
• J. Ancelet-Hustache, Master Eckhart and the Rhineland Mystics (N. Y., 1957),
H!0-38. 0. Karrer, "Die Verurteilung Meister Eckharts," Hochland, 23, pt. I
(1925-26), 660-77, attempts a more detailed defense of the orthodoxy of the
twenty-eight articles found in the Bull.
•A. Dempf, Meister Eckhart (Freiburg, 1960), 18, as cited in I. Degenhardt,
StucLien zum Wandel des Eckhartbildes (Leiden, 1967), 281.
• J. Koch, "Kritische Studien zum Leben Meister Eckharts," originally published in the Archivum Fratrum Praedicatorum, 29 (1959). 5-51; and 30 (1960),
5-52; later reprinted in Koch, KleinB Schriften (Rome, 1973), Vol. I, 247-347 (the
section devoted to the trial may be found on 309-44, and will hereafter be referred
to as Koch).
5 Thery criticized the earlier edition of A. Daniels, " Eine lateinische Rechtfertigungsschrift des Meister Eckhart," Beitriige zur Geschichte der Philosophie des

392

BERNARD MCGINN

even the recovery of new texts would probably do little to
answer all the queries we have.
In the l320's Meister Eckhart was one of the most famous
Dominicans in Germany. A former Paris Master, Prior of
Erfurt, Provincial of Saxony, Vicar-General of Thuringia and
later of Bohemia, and presently magister in the Dominican
studiurn at Cologne, during the trial he testified that: " If I
were less well known among the people and less eager for
justice, I am sure that these attempts would not have been
made against me by the envious." 6 Such remarks, and others
like them by Eckhart's supporters, raise the question of the
motivation behind the proceedings. Who were the envious?
Ingeborg Degenhardt has shown that the evidence upon
which three traditional explanations rest is not strong. 7 Archbishop Henry may have been an enemy of the Dominicans (not
a few bishops were) , but there is little direct evidence for this
and it is remarkable how courteously Eckhart and most of the
others involved treated him. 8 Two renegade Dominicans,
Hermann de Summo and William of Nideggen, did play an
unsavory role in Eckhart's Cologne trial. The Dominican
Procurator General, Gerard of Podahns, accused them of joining
the attack on Eckhart in order to free themselves from order
discipline. 9 The Meister also complained about their defamMittdalters 23.5 (Munster, 1928). Koch, Sll-12, claims that Daniel's edition is
"textlich besser" than that of Thery, though he admits the usefulness of the
latter because of its identification of the sources of the articles. I have preferred
to cite Thery here becaus·e of this advantage and because of his more
rational division of the complex text.
8 ••• si minoris essem fame in populo et minoris zeli justitie
certus sum quod
contra me non essent talia ab emulis attemptata (Thery, 185). Eckhart was
sharply critical of the motives and intelligence of his attackers during the Cologne
phase of the trial. For a list of his criticisms, see M. St. Morard, " Die
frliheste und die neueste Apologie Meister Eckharts," Divus Thomas (Freiburg)
Ser. III, 15 (1937), 327-28 (hereafter referred to as Morard).
7 Studien zum Wandel des Eckhartbudes, 8-15.
8 E. g., Laurent,
342, where Eckhart excuses the Archbishop, and 432, where
Gerard of Podahns does. Nicholas of Strassburg, however, was critical of Henry,
as in Laurent, 334.
0 Laurent, 432, 434.

ECKHART's CONDEMNATION

RECONSIDERED

393

ations; but the language used in both cases does not suggest
that they initiated the proceedings. 10 The fact that Henry
made use of these men, even sending Hermann to Avignon as
his emissary in the Eckhart matter, does cast suspicion on the
purity of his motives, but is not in itself proof of a cabal.
Finally, even though two of the three inquisitors the Archbishop
appointed were Franciscans, Peter of Estate and Albert of
Milan, there is no evidence that rivalry between Franciscans
and Dominicans was at the origin of the process and even less
for 'the claim of W. Preger, 0. Karrer, and others that the
papal condemnation was meant to be some form of atonement
to the Franciscans for the canonization of the controversial
Thomas Aquinas in 1323.11 Given Henry of Virneburg's
reputation as a zealous hunter of heretics, it seems plausible to
suppose with Joseph Koch that it was growing complaints from
a variety of sources about the orthodoxy of Eckhart's preaching
and teaching which moved the Archbishop to institute his
investigation. 12 That these complaints proceeded as often
from bad motives as from good should not surprise anyone who
reflects on the medieval doctrine of original sin.
The supposition that there had been rumblings against Eckhart and possible hints of inquisitorial action is strengthened
by the Meister's reference to the fact that one of the reasons for
the illegality of the Archbishop's proceedings was that the
same or a similar list of objectionable articles had been previously investigated and cleared of suspicion by Nicholas
of Strassburg. 13 Nicholas, a lector in the Cologne studium
where Eckhart served as magister, had been appointed papal
visitor to the German Preachers on August 1, 13!Z5,14 so his
10 Laurent,
!W:?. The contrary view of Ancelet-Hustache, 121-22, has little
support.
11 See the treatment of this question in Degenhardt, 13-15.
12 Koch, 820-28.
13 Laurent, 848.
"Some have seen this appointment as an aftermath of the 1325 decree of the
Dominican General Chapter of Venice against dangerous preaching in Germany.
Koch points out that the Venice decree seems to be directed against political
preaching and that Nicholas's charge appears to have been more disciplinary
than doctrinal (814-16).

394

BERNARD MCGINN

investigation must have been conducted in late 1325 or early
1326.15 It was apparently in the early part of 1326 16 that the
episcopal process was formally begun under two inquisitors,
Reiner Friso, a canon of the cathedral and magister, and the
Franciscan Peter of Estate. 17 The method followed was one
which had been used for centuries but had become increasingly
standardized since 1270, the extraction of excerpts, or articuli,
from the works of the accused and their organization into lists
called rotuli. 18 On September 26, Eckhart presented a formal
defense in writing of forty-nine articles drawn from various
works and gathered into one rotulus. 19 He prefaced this document with a denial of the competency of the court to hear
his case, appealing to the pope or the University of Paris as
the only tribunals that could judge theological matters that did
not touch the faith. 20
There are severial innovative features to the rotuli that were
prepared for Eckhart's trial. Two lists survive: the rotulus of
forty-nine articles that was the subject of the September hearing, and a rotulits of fifty-nine articles taken only from the
vernacular sermons which Eckhart tells us he was given after he
had responded to the first set. 21 These lists, along with the
Koch, 316-19.
On January 24, 1327 (Laurent, 342), Eckhart complained that the process
should have been completed within half a year, thus indicating a duration of a
good deal more than six months.
17 Peter was soon replaced by another Franciscan, Albert of Milan.
It should
be pointed out that the growth of the papal inquisition in the thirteenth century
had by no means cancelled the legislation of the Synod of Verona (1184) concerning the legal responsibility of bishops to pursue the investigation of heresy.
18 On the development
of the procedure, s·ee J. Koch, "Philosophische und
Theologische Irrtumslisten von 1270-1329," Kleine Schriften, II, 423-50.
19 These
were divided into four groups: 15 articles from the vernacular
treatise known as the Benedictus Deus, 6 from a lost apology for the same work,
12 from the Latin commentaries, and 16 from the vernacular sermons.
•• Thery, 185, 196.
21 Since some of the individual
articles are divided into parts which Eckhart
qualified in different fashion, a more exact count would find 58 separate points in
the first rotulus and 68 in the second, thus making 126 in all. For purposes of
citation, however, we will use the following divisions: I. 2 (3), i. e., the third
article of the second section of the first TOtulus; or II (13 B), i. e., the second part
of the thirteenth article of the second ratulus.
15

16

ECKHART'S CONDEMNATION

RECONSIDERED

395

Meister's defenses are found in a Soest ms.; together they form the
Rechtfertigungsschrift, one of the three crucial documents for
our investigation. 22 The evidence of later documents, among them
the Papal Bull, leads to the conclusion that there were at least
two and possibly three other rotuli compiled against Eckhart.
They were all probably drawn up at Cologne, especially given
the Dominican's protests about how long the trial was being
dragged out. 23 One of these was a list of articles from the
Meister's Commentary on John, his most mature theological
work; and at least one other list is postulated because six of
the final twenty-eight condemned articles are found in neither
the first two rotuli nor the John Commentary. 24 In the manner of other late thirteenth-century and early fourteenth-century lists, the Eckhart rotuli show a concem for verbal
precision rather than free paraphrase, 25 as well as a length
that seems to indicate some passion for complete coverage. 26
They are unusual in two important respects: first, they are
the earliest surviving rotuli to include articles translated from
vemacular works; and second, the inquisitors submitted the
lists to the accused and appear to have requested written responses from him. 27
The course of the investigation changed in early
The
Dominican visitor, Nicholas of Strassburg, was cited by
the tribunal, apparently for obstructing the process and
supporting Eckhart.
We possess three strong protests he
gave before the Commission during January of
in which he
denies the competency of the court over the exempt Dominicans,
blames the attack on the renegades of his own order, and
appeals for dimissory letters (the Apostoli) to take his case to
the pope. 28 On January
Eckhart himself made a similar plea
See note 5 on editions.
Laurent, 342.
24 Koch
(325-27) points out that three of these articles ( # 11, 13, 20) have
not yet been satisfactorily identified in any of Eckhart's known works.
25 Koch, " Irrtumslisten,"
433.
••Koch, 327.
21 Koch,
••One on Jan. 14 and two on Jan. 15 (Laurent, 333-40).
22
23

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for dimissorial letters, citing the part played by the evil
brethren in the trial and the irrational delays of the inquisitors
as reasons for his appeal. 29 On February 22, both inquisitors
denied Eckhart's appeal; but, as Koch maintains, this was a
formality, since when such an .appeal had been made the
accused had the right to pursue it, whatever the decision of his
immediate judges.so On February 13, as a public proclamation
of this new stage in the process, Eckhart preached a sermon
in the Dominican church at Cologne and then had a Latin
document read out which he himself translated into the
vernacular. In it he protested his innocence, publicly renounced any errors that he had made in speaking or writing,
and briefly commented on three that had come to his attention.s 1
Even though the surviving text of this document is clearly
faulty, it is coherent with the tenor of Eckhart's whole defense, and Koch's judgment that it is " ... the most embarrassing " document of the trial seems peremptory and gratuitous. 32
In the Spring of 1327, accompanied by other prominent
Dominicans, Eckhart departed for Avignon to defend himsclf .s3 While at the papal court he probably stayed iat the
Dominican priory, free to pursue his case but not to leave
until judgment had been passed. While our documentation
from the Avignon phase of the trial is not plentiful, it is
sufficient to recover the major stages. Pope John XXII
established a commission of theologians and cardinals to review
the rotuli sent from Cologne and Eckhart's responses. It seems
hard to imagine that the Meister would have made the trip to
••Laurent, 341-44.
3 ° Koch, 331-32.
See the document in Laurent, 346-48. The question of the
dimissorials was incorrectly interpret:ed by X. de Hornstein in his Les grands
mystiques allemands du X!Ve siede (Lucerne, 1922), 39-41.
31 Laurent,
344-45.
32 Koch, 332-33.
33 Doubts that Eckhart went to Avignon must cede to the witness of a most
unfriendly source, William of Ockham, who testified to the Meister's presence
there. See Tractatus contra Benedictum IV, 4, in Opera Politica (edd. R. I<'. Benne!< and H. S. Offier. Manchester, 1956), III, 251-53; and Dialogus Magi1dri III,
tr. 11 (ed. Goldhast, 909).

ECKHART's CONDEMNATION

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397

Avignon without hope of making further defense of his case.
Pope John eventually received two reports on the matter of
Eckhart. The one that survives to us, the Gutachten, that is,
the votum theologicum of the full commission, probably dates
from 1327.34 This interesting document not only shows that
the unwieldly mass of articles from the original rotuli had been
carefully pruned down to a manageable group of twenty-eight
(the same articles that were to appear in the Papal Bull),
but it also displays considerable theological skill in its rebuttal
of the Meister's 'arguments. The form of the document follows
a reverse model 0£ the scholastic quaestio: each suspect article
is taken as the statement of an unorthodox position, reasons
are then given for the error of this view, the Meister's defense
of the position is summarized, and finally decisive rejoinders
are given to his arguments. 35 For whatever reasons of dis,;;atisfaction or further confirmation, in 1328 Pope John also
submitted the articles to Jacques Fournier whom he had created
cardinal in December, 1327, and named to a special post at
Avignon. We do not know whether the redoubtable inquisitor
found this investigation quite as interesting as the ones he was
accustomed to at Montaillou. His response is lost, though
f,agments of it remain in the unedited Sentence Commentary
and Ten Responses 0£ John of Basel. 36
On April 30, 1328, Pope John wrote to Archbishop Henry
assuring him that the process was still going forward despite
the fact that Eckhart was dead. 37 The aged Meister probably
saw his end at Avignon, and there is no reason to doubt that the
retraction of his errors mentioned in the Bull was made during
his final illness. 38 Such an action would fully conform to what
we know of Eckhart's life and his constant loyalty to the church.
3 • It was discovered in the Vatican by Cardinal Mercati and subsequently edited
by Pelster.
35 Not all the articles contain all four parts.
36 Koch, 312-14, and 337-39, gives a good account
and edits some of the
important fragments.
87 This letter was edited by T. Kaepelli, "Kurze Mitteilungen
iiber mittelalterliche Dominikanerschriftsteller," Archivum Fratrum Praedicatorum 10 (1940), 94,
••Koch, 343-44.

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BERNARD MCGINN

Eleven months elapsed before the signing of In agro dorninico.
The Papal Bull, the third crucial surviving document, has been
seen by Koch as a milestone in the evolution of papal censures. 39
The twenty-eight articles are divided according to the type of
c2nsure they receive and are generally grouped into similar
doctrinal categories. The first fifteen are adjudged " ... to contain the error or stain of heresy as much from the tenor of
their words as from the sequence of their thoughts; " while the
following eleven are found " ... evil-sounding, very dangerous
and suspect of heresy, though with many explanations and
additions they might take on or possess a catholic meaning." 40
The two final articles ·are also condemned as heretical, though
since there was question whether Eckhart actually taught them,
they are put in a separate category. 41
The heretical articles begin with three extracts drawn from
the Latin works that imply the eternity of creation, ·a doctrine
smacking of the Averroism that had been anathema since the
Paris condemnations of 1270 and 1277.42 There follow three
articles from the Cornrnentary on John which imply that God
is equally praised and glorified through evil works as through
good. Articles seven through nin; appear " quietistic " in
advocating seeking nothing from God and even renouncing the
reward of heaven. Articles ten through thirteen deal with the
relationship between God and the believer, ten claiming that
we are transformed into God in the way bread is converted into
the Body of Christ, eleven and twelve saying that the good
man receives all the gifts that the incarnate Christ does, and
Koch, " Irrtumslisten," 444.
•• ... tam ex suorum sono verborum quam ex suarum connexione sententiarum
errorem seu labem heresis continere ..
. . . nimis male sonare et multum esse temerarios de heresique suspectos, licet
cum multis expositionibus et suppletionibus sensum catholicum formare valeant
vel habere ... (Laurent, 443).
"Koch, 342-43, points out that the final condemnation is milder than that of the
votum where all twenty-eight articles were condemned as heretical, and supposes
that Cardinal William Peter de Godino, a former student of Eckhart's at Paris,
may have had a role in the modification.
••On these significant condemnations see the latest study by J. Wippel, "The
Condemnations of 1270 and 1277 at Paris," The Journal, af Medieval and Renaissance Studies 7 (1977), 169-201.
89

ECKHART'S CONDEMNATION

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399

thirteen stating the good man's equality with God, even m
the work of creation a.nd in the generation of the Son. Articles
fourteen and fifteen return to the second theme, that is, to
positions that seem to make sin equal to virtue as long as it
would be the will of God. The two appended •articles contain
the famous statement about the uncreated something in the
soul, 43 and one that denies the propriety of the language of
goodness in the case of God. 44
The suspect articles are also drawn both from the Latin
treatises and the German works. Sirleen through nineteen oast
doubt upon the efficacy and goodness of exterior acts; twenty
through twenty-two a!'e expressions of the familiar Eckhartian
theme of the Birth of the Word in the soul. Articles twentythree and twenty-four deny any distinction in God in ways
that seem to threaten the doctrine of the Trinity. Article
twenty-five is an obscure text from the John Commentary
on the necessity of loving God ·and man equally, and article
twenty-six is the noted assertion from the Sermon " Omne
datum optimum " that all creatures are pure nothing. 45
A detailed analysis of Eckhart's response to the more than a
hundred articles from Rechtfertigungsschrift and the twentyeight from the Avignon votum, despite the considerable over•• Aliquid est in anima, quod est increatum et increabile; si tota anima ess·et
talis, esset increata et increabilis; et hoc est intellectus (Laurent, 442). The
statement is found in Pr. 13, "Vidi supra montem" (DW I, 220. 4-5), and there
are equivalent statements in other sermons. This statement and its equivalents
were key issues in both surviving rotuli, cf. I. 4 (6 and 7) (Thery, 179), and II
(3, 8, 12, and 18C) (Thery, 209, 214, 218, 224).
From the outset of his
Defense, Eckhart said that such statements were "false and an error" and
claimed that he had never made them (Thery, 188, 191, 201, 211, 214-15). He
said the same in his public proclamation of Feb. 13, 1327 (Laurent, 345, which
should be compared with Thiery 214-15), and before the Avignon commission
(Pelster, 1111-12).
••Taken from Pr. 9, "Quasi stella matutina" (DW I, 148. 5-7). Eckhart never
denied saying this in his two surviving references. cf. II (54) (Thery, 263),
and votum, art. V (Pelster, 1112). In the latter case, however, he does admit
that it is erroneous as it sounds. The puzzle of why this article should be classed
with the other remains.
•• DW I, 69.8-70.1.

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BERNARD MCGINN

lapping, is outside the scope of this study. It is possible, however, to summarize the principles upon which Eckhart constructed his Defense and to illustrate several key cases of how
he made use of these principles to defend articles that eventua1ly made their way into the Papal Bull.
The cornerstone of Eckhart' s
rests upon the distinction between heresy and error, that is, upon his unwavering
intention to teach the Catholic faith. In dependence upon the
tradition reaching back to Augustine and enshrined in the
Decretum, 46 the Meister claims: "I am able to be in error,
but I cannot be a heretic, for the first belongs to the intellect,
the second to the will." 47 Because " only obstinate adherence
to error makes a heretic," 48 and because Eckhart proclaimed
himself willing to renounce publicly anything found erroneous
in his writing or preaching, 49 he continued to maintain that the
proceedings against him as a heretic were unjustified. In one
sense we may say that John XXII and Eckhart were in
agreement, because the Bull In agro dominico does not condemn
the Meister as: a heretic, but rather anathematizes certain
propositions he had taught, explicitly mentioning his own
revocation of these at the end of his life.50
Eckhart felt that he was defending himself only against the
possibility of theological error. It is significant that during
the defense he often admitted articles as " erronea vel falsa,"
but never used the term " heretica." In his responses to the
accusations Eckhart had two initial options open to himhe could deny that a particular article had really come from
him, or he could admit it as his own. He made no denials
"Augustine, Ep. 43.l (CSEL 34: 85); cf. Celestine I, Ep. 25.3 (PL 50: 550-51).
Dem-etum IIP, c.xxiv, q. 3, cap. xxix (PL 187: 1306-07). Eckhart cites these
texts in Thery, 197-98.
41 Errare enim possum, hereticus esse non possum, nam primum ad intellectum
pertinet, secundum ad voluntatem (Thery, 186; cf. similar statements on 191, 19798, 206).
••Sola enim pertinax adhesio erronei hereticum facit (Thery, 191; cf. also 206).
••In the Feb. 13 proclamation (Laurent, 345).
50 Laurent, 444.

ECKHART's CONDEMNATION

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401

regarding extracts from his written works, 51 but there are
several regarding articles from the vernacular sermons found
in the two rotuli. 52 One of the articles he continued to deny
made its way through the process into the Papal Bull-that
concerning the uncreated part of the soul (the most puzzling
since the evidence suggests that he did say it) .53 Koch was of
the opinion that Eckhart should have invoked the principle
of denial more frequently, given the inexactness of the reportationes of sermons. 54 He stresses the objective character of
the inquisitorial process and Eckhart's failure to understand
this-the investigators were after what was said, and Eckhart
could have denied saying exactly this. 55 Gabriel Thery, on the
other hand, seemed to feel that the reporters were more often
right than not and Eckhart was at fault in the complaints he
did make. 56 The Meister himself stands somewhere between his
two critics in a position that squares perfectly with his general
principle. His appeal is always to intention rather than to
pettifogging questions of verbal detail, except where he felt
himself to be gravely misrepresented.
After admitting that a particular article did indeed come
from him, the next choice Eckhart faced was either to confess
error or advance a defense. The Meister repeated that he
would reject anything that had led anyone into error, 57 and in
• 1 He even admits in the case of I.1-3,
... que omnia fateor me scripsisse et
dixisse (Thery, 196).
52 In his introductory
statement to I.4, he refers to the problem of false
He subsequently invokes erroneous reporting in the cases of I.4
(IA, 6 and 13), and II (51). Morard, 329-30, notes that these denials would
also affect the parallel articles IT (3, 12, 15C, and 18C),
58 See note
43 above. This denial has puzzled interpreters of Eckhart. G.
Thery in his "Contribution a l'histoire du proces d'Eckhart. IV," La vie irpiritudle.
Supplement, 13 (1926), 58-59, laid the blame for this contradiction not on any
conscious lie on Eckhart's part, but on his " ... sincerites successives qui s'annulent
reciproquement." Morard, 330-34, also gives a discussion.
5 • Koch, 336.
55 Koch,
328.
••" Contribution .. .III," La vie spirituelle. Supplement 12
180-87.
57 In the Introduction
to I. 4, citing St. Augustine (Thery, 196-97), and in the
Feb. 13 proclamation (Laurent, 345) , and in the general Introduction (Thery, 186).

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twelve cases he does admit to error or falsity, 58 while six others
are characterized as in some way evil-sounding. 59 It is significant to note that these eighteen all refer to extracts from the
vernacular Sermons, where they form just under twenty percent
of the material taken from these works (18 of 92). In his
response to one third of the articles that he admits are in
some way erroneous Eckhart adopts a puzzling and at first
sight annoying tactic-after admitting error he immediately
refers to some legitimate but seemingly irrelevant doctrinal or
moral point. 60 A similar procedure is found in the defense of
some articles asserted to be true. 61 Eckhart's explanations
often seem not quite to the point, a fact that gave considerable
annoyance to the Avignon commission who comment acidly
"nihil ad propositum" or the like in a number of cases. 62 One
might suppose that the Meister had begun to ramble in his
dotage (the possibility cannot be excluded in all cases), but
in its basic thrust it seems to me that this procedure also squares
with Eckhart's stress on the importance of intention. He is
trying to show that an erroneous or problematic statement had
been intended to promote the same doctrinal and moral goals
as a more familiar and unobjectionable one.
This stress on intention is absolutely central. Even in the
cases where Eckhart defends the correctness of the article in
question, he frequently notes that he had intended the statement in one way and his accusers had taken it in another. As
he put it in his response to a series of points concerning his
I. 4 (IA, IE, !lA, 4, 5, 6, SB), and II (3, 7, 15C, 36, and 50).
I.4 (ID)-male sonat, primo aspectu (Thery, 199)
I.4 (8A)--obscurum est quod dicitur (TMry, !lO!l)
I.4 (10)-male intellectum
(Thery, 203).
II (31)-tardioribus absurdum videtur (Thery, 237)
II (48B)-male sonat et sic falsum est (Thery, £51).
II (56)-non bene stat
(Thery, £64).
60 E. g., I. 4 (!lA, 4), and II (3, 7, 48B, and 50).
• 1 E. g., I. I
(11), I. 3 (8), I. 4 (14), and II (14).
62 "Nichil ad propositum"
to articles IX and XIX (Pelster, 1113, 1118). Cf.
also articles V, XVI, XVII, XVIII, XX, and the attack on Eckhart's misuse of
patristic quotations in XIV and XVIII.
58
59

ECKHART's CONDEMNATION

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403

teaching about the Birth of the Word in the soul: " The whole
of what was said is false and absurd according to the imagination of the opponents, but it is true according to the true understanding ... " 63 The dispute then, in Eckhart's mind, was over
the sense of the articles in question, and he proposed a series
of hermeneutical principles to be used in penetrating the true
intention of the extracts. These may be conveniently divided
into those dealing with the manner of presentation and those
dealing with theological presuppositions.
Eckhart freely admits the unusual character of what he has
to say: "omnia esse vera quamvis rara sint plurima et subtilia." 64 He also appeals to the manner of presentation, for in
the case of four extracts taken from the Sermons he defends
himself by noting that he was using the emphatic way of
speaking frequently adopted by preachers. 65 More important
in this regard, though, is his appeal to the moral effect of what
he has to say. Over and over again, in the case of at least
twenty of the articles in question, he asserts that what he said,
no matter how unusual sounding, was intended to rouse his
hearers to some good resolve or action. 66 Eckhart's consciousness of the special character of the theology of preaching (we
might perhaps see it as analogous to the functional specialty
of " communications " in Bernard Lonergan's map of the
method of theology) 61 was another keystone of his Defense that
was not to be accepted by his accusers or the pope. 68
•• Solutio: totum quod dictum est, falsum est et absurdum, secundum ymaginationem adversantium; verum est tamen secundum verum intellectum ... II (89)
(in Thery, 248; cf. also Thery, 196-97, 208, 209, and 266).
•• Thery, 186. Similar statements are found in both the Latin and German
works.
••II (11, 14, 15B, and 88).
•• E. g., I. 1 (4, 5, 7); I. 4 (2, 8, 6, 7, 18, 15); II (8, 4, s;, 26', 86,
47, 48B, 49, 51, 58, and 54). Morard, 887-88, also notes the importance of this
appeal.
•• B. Lonergan, Method in Theology (N. Y., 1972), 855-68. We should note that
all these appeals to the moral effect come in the vernacular works.
••The Avignon votum at times deliberately count1!rs Eckhart's moral defense
by claiming that his articles will lead men into sin. See articles VII, IX,
xm, and xv.

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The appeal to authority so frequently invoked by Eckhart
in his Defense is the most immediately obvious of the tools
that he used to defend the content of his statements. References to scripture abound, at least fifty-three of the responses
in the Rechtfertigungsschrift explicitly citing biblical texts.
But the Meister rarely has time for more than a citation or
two-there is almost no real exegesis in the Defense. The
references to the auctoritates or doctores are also very rarely
worked out in any detail. They sometimes display misunderstandings or misuses of the texts in question. Although the
weakest part of the Defense, they serve an important function
and really differ little from the usual scholastic method of
dealing with auctoritates where, as M.-D. Chenu reminds us,
" ... referring to authors came to mean no more than a conventional citing of them." 69 Eckhart uses Augustine more often
than anyone else. Two Augustinian principles are of special
interest in the course of his responses: the first, the notion
that man is not so much properly the imago Dei as he who is
made ad imaginem Dei; 10 the second, the teaching of the D'e
Trinitate that " ... from what is known and the knower comes
an offspring common to both." 11 Outside the citation of these
principles, there are at least twenty other occasions where the
Meister makes direct appeal to the authority of the bishop of
Hippo. 12
Thomas Aquinas also forms a special case worth noting.
••Toward Understanding St. Thomas (Chicago, 1964), 129.
••Eckhart never mentions Augustine in using this principle, which was, of course,
also available from other sources. The Meister uses it to distinguish between our
sonship and that of Christ, the true imago, in line with the earlier usage of
Augustine (e. g., De div. quaest. 83: 51), in I. 4 (IE, 6, and 8), and in II (39,
53, and 57). In II (1) he makes use of the later Augustinian teaching (e. g., De
Trin. VII. 6. 12) where man is ad imaginem totius Dei.
11 De Trin. IX. U. 18. Eckhart used the principle in I. 4 (2), and II (19, 34,
and 53), and in defense of the passage from an unknown Sermon that formed the
basis for article XXIII of the vo.fum (where he seems unjustly taken to task).
12 E. g., I. 4 (7, 11, 14); II, Introduction
(Thery, 208), and (10, 27 where five
references occur, 29, 33, 38, 40, 41, 42, 47, 57, and 59B). The Meister makes use
of Augustine more frequently in II. than in I. The Bishop of Hippo was also
cited in the votum in response to articles IX, XIV, and XXVIII.

ECKHART'S CONDEMNATION

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405

For Eckhart the attack on aspects of the teaching of Aquinas in
the condemnation of 1277 was a precedent for the attacks that
the envious were directing at him. 73 Thomas had been vindicated by the canonization of 1323, a fact that gave the Meister
encouragement in his struggle. Eckhart appeals explicitly to
Thomas eight times (once against the sense of the text) ,74 and
there are a number of other points where he defends positions
which may be described as broadly or narrowly Thomistic. 75
It should be noted that two of the places where he cites Thomas
directly enter into the final condemnation-one where his use
was an illegitimate one, 76 the other where it was purely adventitious to the argument. 77 Eckhart invokes a wide range of
patristic autl1orities, and not a few philosophers as well.78
It is clear that he thought the appeal to authority was important
for his case, 79 but in the last analysis we should say that this
too may be reduced to the question of intention. The function
of citing the mwtoritates is to show that he intended to teach
the same doctrine that they had taught.
More difficult to summarize easily are the theological axioms
he brings forward to guide the interpreter in vindicating the
oi'thodoxy of his positions. In two places in the Rechtf erti78 See I, Introduction
(Thery, 185). On the influence of the condemnation on
Eckhart, see Thery, "Contribution ... II," La vie spirituelle. Supplement 9 (1924),
165-68 .
., I. 1 (4); I. 3 (3, 9, and 12); I. 4 (ID, and 3); II (27, and 44).
75 E. g., I. 2 (2, 5); I. 3 (1, 3-7); I. 4 (7, and 21).
Note that the use of
Thomas is relatively more frequent in I.
76 In agro dominico # 17, which is drawn from I. 3 (12) (Thery, 176).
Eckhart's
defense (Thery, 195) cites STh IaIIae 20, 4, in support of the proposition that
an external act is not properly good or divine, something far from the Thomistic
position.
77 In the response to I. 4 (ID)
(Thery, 199). This article wound up as In agro
dominico # 22.
78 Among
the Fathers and ecclesiastical authorities:
Boethius
(3 times),
Chrysostom (1), Gregory of Nyssa (1), Bernard (5), Origen (2), Dionysius (1),
Bede (1), Jerome (1), and Albert the Great (1). Among the philosophers:
Aristotle (7), Maimonides (1), Seneca (2), Cicero (2), Avicenna (3), Plotinus
(1) , Averroes (l) , and the Lib er de causis (1) .
79 He
summarizes the weight of his appeal to authority at the end of
I (Thery, 205-07).

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BERNARD MCGINN

gungsschnft Eckhart gave explicit lists of principles to be used
to understand his rara et subtilia. The first such exposition
comes at the beginning of the response to the articles in the
first three sections of the first rotulus and is more important
than its explicit citations in the following articles might suggest. The function of these rules is not unlike that of the
" terminos regulasque " that Boethius lays down at the outset
of his Quomodo substantiae 80-three principles from which
all that follows is developed, or in Eckhart's case, at least
defended. The first states that the use of the term inquantum
.
h as, " or " t o t h e extent t h at, " as m
. " b onus mquan.
(" masmuc
tum bonus") is meant to signify exclusion, that is, to indicate
that one is speaking from a single, limited, abstract point of
view.81 Eckhart refers to the principle explicitly several times
to explain how the good man can be said to possess the
attributes of God, 82 but the implied use of the principle is far
more pervasive and important.
The second principle flows
from it-" Good and goodness are one. Good to the extent
that it is good signifies goodness alone, just as white signifies
only the quality of whiteness." 83 Eckhart notes that this
is true univocally of God, but analogically in relation to God
and man. He invokes this principle directly in a number of
places, 84 and in the broad sense it may also he said to be the
basis for many of his statements predicating divine things of
man. The final principle is yet another consequence of the
principle inquantum. Every agent, to the extent that it is an
agent, does not rest until it has bestowed its form upon and
given reality to its object. Precisely as agent it is underived
and at once relatively opposed to yet identical with its object
Boethius, The Theofogical Treatises (Loeb Classical Library ed., 40-42).
Thery, 186-87.
82 E. g., I. 1 (18); I. 2 (3);
and II (14, and 36). For an important use of
this principle in the Latin works, see In Johannem n. 14 sqq. (LW III, 13 sqq,).
88 Secundum est quod bonus et bonitas
sunt unum. Bonus enim inquantum
bonus solam bonitatem significat, sicut album solam qualitatem, albedinem
scilicet, significat (Thery, 186) .
8 '!. 1 (4, 8, 13); I. 2 (3); I. 3 (2).
In 'the Second rotulus it is invoked in
the case of 14, and implied in 86 and 59.
80

81

ECKHART'S CONDEMNATION

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407

in the reality of the act. The principle is cited directly only in
the case of the first four articles taken from the Benedictus
Deus, 85 but the application to creation of the notion that "to
move and to be moved begin and end at the same time according to the nature of the relations " 85 " was to be one of the major
sources of Eckhart's difficulties.
The other list of principles that Eckhart explicitly highlights
comes at the outset of the response to the second rotulus and is
negative in character-a brief note of six heretical implications
of pertinacious attacks upon his own teaching. These are: that
man cannot be united with God; thait creatures are not of
themselves nothing; that God did not create the world in the
now of his eternity; that the external act adds some moral
goodness to the internal act; that the Holy Spirit can be given
to someone who is not a son of God; and that God is not being. 86
Here again, it seems that an appeal to intention is crucial to
understand why these points are cited in the Defense. Eckhart is claiming that his teaching is designed to uphold the
opposed truths of the faith. Even here, though, there was to
be disagreement between the Meister and his judges: who
condemned his formulations of the second, third and fourth
of the implied opposites. 87
There are, of course, many other principles that Eckhart
used in his rebuttal. Some of these were the common possession of the scholastics, such as the familiar notion that whatever
is received is received according to the manner of the recipient
and its converse that a giver must give according to his mode of
being, 88 but others are peculiar to the Meister's thought, such
as the appeal to detachment in the specific sense of Abgescheidenheit,89 or the claim that to love in the manner of God
means to love without distinctions. 90 Two of the specifically
85

I. 1 (1-4).

Movere enim et moveri simul oritur et moritur juxta naturam
(Thery, 187).
86 Thery, 208-09.
87 In agro dominwo # 26, 1-3, 17-18.
88 E. g., I. 4 (7); II (10 and 26) .
89 E. g., I. 1 (9); II (IO).
90 E. g., II (27, 37, 42).
85 "

relationum

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BERNARD MCGINN

Eckhartian principles are of such special importance to the
whole Defense that they deserve analysis here.
A quarter of the articles condemned in the Papal Bull deal
with some form of claims for equality between Christ and the
believer (# 10-13,
During the course of the investigation, Eckhart proposed a fairly consistent set of responses in
this area. In defense of such statements as " Whatever Holy
Scripture says of Christ is also totally true of every good and
divine man," 91 or," The noble man is that only-begotten Son of
God whom the Father generates from eternity," 92 Eckhart on
the one hand affirmed that the same Christ was both the
Father's only-begotten and the source of our sonship, and on
the other distinguished between the perfect natural sonship
of Christ and our own participatory imperfect sonship. According to the Avignon votum, he defended the second of the
articles cited above and another equivalent to it thus: " ... he
says they are erroneous as they sound, but supports them by
saying that it is the same Son of God who is the only-begotten
in the Trinity and by whom all the faithful are sons of God
through adoption." 93 This appeal to unity of agent but
distinction in forms of sonship is frequently coupled with
references to the doctrine of the Mystical Body. 94 The explanation did not satisfy the Avignon commission, however, who
complained, " That does nothing to prove the article, namely,
that the good man insofar as he is man can be said to be the
only-begotten Son of God eternally born of the Father, as the
words of these articles sound ... " 95 We see a crucial disagree91 Duodecimus
articulus: Quicquid dicit sacra scriptura de Chrisito, hoc
etiam totum verificatur de omni bono •et divino homine (Laurent, 439).
•• Vicesimusprimus articulus: Homo nobilis est ille unigenitus filius Dei, quern
pater eternaliter genuit (Laurent, 440).
•• Istos duos articulos dictus magister, ut sonant, dicit erroneos, sed ea;;
verificat dicens quod idem est Dei filius unigenitus in trinitate et quo omnes
fideles filii Dei sunt per adopcionem (Pelster, 1117).
••The distinction of sonships forms the basis for the responses in I 4 (IC,
IE, G,); II (8, 15A, 27, 39, 40, 57, 59B).
95 Sed istud nichil facit ad verificationem
articuli, ut bonus homo possit dici
unigenitus Dei filius a patre eternaliter genitus secundum quod homo, sicut articulorum verba sonant ... (Pelster, 1117).

ECKHART'S CONDEMNATION

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409

ment here. Eckhart and his accusers admit that there is both
identity and distinction in the relation of our sonship to that
of Christ. Eckhart's more radical formulation of this identity
subintends the inquanturn principle-" The noble or good man
to the extent that he is noble (i. e., speaking exclusively) is
the only-begotten Son of God." The commission's response
will have none of this, but uses a formula that reduplicates the
concrete subject rather than the formal quality, that is, "the
good man to the extent that he is man " cannot be called the
only-begotten Son. 96
Another crucial difference in theological language between
Eckhart and his accusers becomes evident in studying the
Meister's response to attacks upon his notion of indistinction.
This key Eckhartian theme was challenged from two sides
during the trial, and both attacks found their way into the
Papal Bull. Articles twenty-three and twenty-four of In agro
dominico attack the Meister's teaching on the indistinction
within God. Article twenty-three is drawn from a passage that
the first rotulu,s took from Eckhart's Commentary on Exodus
where he cites Maimonides on divine unity and ends with a
typical maxim of his own, " no distinction can exist or be
apprehended in God himself." 97 To this and to the similar
article from the Benedictus Deus that the Bull took from the
first list Eckhart replied almost indignantly in the Cologne
trial that to speak otherwise would be to deny the oneness of
God. 98 The Meister was more detailed at Avignon, but
to his response that " ... the distinction of Persons is not in God,
for these three are one God; the distinction of Persons, is
from one another and from what is opposed by way of re•• ... secundum quod homo (ibid.). For another example of the rejection of
the abstract application of the inquantum principle, see the response of the commissioners to article XXIII (In agro dominico # 13) in Pelster, 1121.
97 Nulla igitur in ipso distinctio
esse potest aut intelligi (Thery, 176). Drawn
from In Exod., n. 58 (L W II, 65) , the citation appears in The Guide to the Perplexed I, 57. For other references to God as indistinct in the Defense, see I. 4
(11), and II (23, 43).
98 The second article is I. 1 (15) which became # 24 of In agro dominico. For
the responses, see Thery, 191, 195.

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MCGINN

lL-tion," the commission answered that it is in God in the sense
that the opposed relations are founded in the divine essence. 99
They also felt that the second article, in its denial of distinction in God either in nature or in Persons (note that Eckhart did not say " inter personas ") , was reducible to Sabellianism, though as Koch notes the Meister had guarded himself
against this heresy quite carefully in the John Commentary. 100
Even more mystifying for the inquisitors was the use that
Eckhart made of the indistinction between God and the soul
in defending his as•sertions about the Birth of the Word (In
agro dominico, #
and on the ability of the good man
to perform divine works (In agro dominioo, # 10, # 13) . This
indistinction is formulated in many ways in the Cologne Defense, for example that " ... God himself as one (because he
is not other) is in every being in undivided fashion through
power, presence, and essence, the unbegotten Father and the
begotten Son." 101 The special presence of God in man's
soul, according to Eckhart, is that he is found in the intellect
as truth, the will as goodness, and in the essence of the soul
as esse.102 If God is in the essence of the soul as indistinct esse,
then he is there as the Father begetting the Word without any
distinction, that is, as " indistinct from me and undivided or not
separated, as if he were not in me." 103 The same teaching on
indistinction is invoked as warrant for speaking of man per99 ••• distinccio
personarum non est in Deo: nam hii tres unus Deus sunt,
distinccio autem personarum ab invicem est et ab opposito relative. The response
of the commission was: Et negare distinctas et oppositas relaciones ac pluralitatem
earum esse in Deo cum in divina essencia fundentur, est hereticum ... (Peilster,
1122).
100 Pelster,
ibid. Koch, 339, cites the evidence of In lohannem n. 358 sqq.
(LW III, 303 sqq.).
101 ••• deus et ipse unus, quia non est alius, est in quolibet ente per potentiam,
presentiam et essentiam indivisus, pater ingenitus et filius genitus. I. 4 (1 B)
(Thery, 198). Another formulation found in II (55) is: Solutio: dicendum:
omnis distinctus a deo, distinctus est ab esse, a quo immediate est omne esse
(Thery, 263).
102 I. 4 (13), II (5, 51).
10 • Item indistinctus
a me et indivisus sive non separatus, quasi non sit in me
(Thery, 199).

ECKHART'S CONDEMNATION

RECONSIDERED

411

forming divine works. 104 As I have tried to show elsewhere, 105
the dialectical coincidence of opposites of distinction/indistinction is central to Eckhart's thought, and Eckhart can only be
understood if both poles of the dialectic are simultaneously
kept in mind. This is just what the Avignon commissioners
refused to do. One has only to read their response to the
twentieth article in the votum (In agro dominioo, # 10), where
Eckhart appeals to the pole of distinction and they refuse to
allow the appeal to see that this is so.106
To go further with an analysis of individual issues would be
the scope of a much longer study. I hope that my attempt to
spell out some of the major principles upon which Eckhart based
his Defense has suggested that the negative judgments of
Thery and Koch are too harsh. Eckhart's responses were
uneven, but they were not without coherence nor without
significance as a challenge to the theological basis of the
inquisitorial process. I should not, on the other hand, go so
fa;r as to see the Defense as a unique key to the Meister's
thought. The special circumstances of a legal process in which
one has to respond to points singled out by opponents make it
difficult to give a fully-balanced presentation of one's own
system. At its best, however, as in the lengthy reply to articles
twenty-four through twenty-seven of the second rotulus, a
model scholastic quaestio on the metaphysics of the Incarnation, it is equal to anything that Eckhart has left us. 106 •
Still, Eckhart's propositions were condemned, and we must
finally face the question of the significance of the condemnation.
Many have wondered if they were legitimately condemned. My
answer would be that they were legitimately condemned acE. g., II (11, and 31).
See my paper, "Meister Eckhart on God as Absolute Unity," prepared
for the" International Conference on Neoplatonism in the History of Christianity"
(Washington, 1978), and to be published in the proceedings of that Conference.
106 To Eckhart's
response, "quod distinccio non actuat ex parte dantis; sed
ex parte suscipiencium," they replied, " Et secundum verba articuli, sicut est
indistinccio ex parte dantis, sic est indistinccio ex parte suscipiencium quia fiunt
unum esse cum eo indistinctum" (Pelster, 1118).
100 • Thery,
10 '

105

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BERNARD MCGINN

cording to a process that Eckhart and at least some others in
his day thought was illegitimate, at least insofar (inquantum
again) as it led to the censure of heresy. First, there is the
question of the extract method itself. Many of Eckhart's
procedures in his Defense are designed to try to put the
extracts back in their context, and in this; connection Edmund
Colledge has recently noted that we need to restore the scandalous articles of In agro dominico to their contexts and synthesize the Meister's statements rather than separate them in order
toevaluatehis.thought. 101 Colledge also points out that Jacques
Fournier at least also felt uncomfortable about the extract
method when he pleaded to John XXII to be excused from
passing judgment on eleven articles taken from Durandus of
St. Pourcain " ... because he did not have a copy of the bishop's
writings from which these questions had been formulated." 108
We also know that a defense based upon intention, that is, one
that not only questions the validity of the extract method
but also suggests another manner of procedure in cases of
theological suspicion, was used by Peter Olivi in his response
to the articles drawn up against him in 1282.109
Eckhart' s articles were condemned, at least according to the
intention of the Avignon votum, as they :sounded objectively.
Prout sonat, ut verba sonant are repeated throughout the
votum. In its constant appeal to intention Eckhart's Defense
rejected the prout sonat principle. The Meister and the commission disagreed fundamentally on both the extract method
and the way in which the extracts should be interpreted. It is
not surprising that they talked past each other so frequently. 110
There has been considerable speculation on the reasons why
John XXII pursued the condemnation of the respected Dominican with such vigor. Gordon Leff has proposed a theory of
guilt by association. In a climate where papal authority was
107 E. Colledge,
"Meister Eckhart: Studies in his Life and Works,"
Thomist 42 (1978), 249, 251, 257.
10 • CoUedge, 247, citing the discussion and text in Koch, 339, n. 247.
10 • See the discussion in Koch, "Irrtumslisten,"
437.
110 As noted by Koch, 328.

The

ECKHART'S CONDEMNATION

RECONSIDERED

413

becoming preoccupied with mystical heresy, especially the socalled "Free Spirit," many of Eckhart's propositions might
have been thought to encourage such tendencies among the
simple and unwary. 111 Abstracting from the question of the
real existence of the Free Spirit, it was certainly a mental
reality for the inquisitors and the pope, and there is, indeed,
evidence of such fears in the Papal Bull, the subs·equent letter
to Henry of Virnehurg, and also in the decrees of the Dominican
General Chapter of Toulouse held in 1328.112 But this theory
would not explain the reason for the condemnation of the
articles that do not deal with mystical issues, such as those
on the doctrine of creation and those advancing traditional
themes of negative theology. 113 This suggests that the condemnation gives evidence of a radical clash of styles of theological expression and a fear of theological pluralism that would
have led to the rejection of Eckhart no matter what else had
been in the air.
The commission votum and what we have of Fournier's
dossier show the confrontation of theological languages in clear
fashion. " Quidquid recipitur secundum modum recipientis
recipitur "-the commission was almost bound to absorb the
isolated excerpts from Eckhart's works into its own world of
discourse and to judge them by rules that were not fully
adequate to uncover their true meaning. Eckhart was almost
bound to talk past them as he appealed to principles that the
commissioners either did not recognize or did not understand.
In a kind of bizarre reversal, one might say that Eckhart's
articles were condemned precisely inquantum articuli--the one
time the commission was willing to accept his principle.
The theological literalism of the prout sonat of the votum
G. Leff, Heresy in the Later Middle Ages (N. Y., 1967), I, 308-10.
For the Toulouse decrees which warn against preaching "subtilia" to the
people, see Monumenta Ordinis Fratrum Praedicatorum Historica IV. Acta
Capituforum Generalium II (Rome, 1899), 180. On the context, see Degenhardt,
30-32.
11 • Even Thery, "Contribution ... V," La vie spirituelle. Supplement 14 (1926),
55-65, found it difficult to understand why <these had been condemned.
111

112

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BERNARD MCGINN

was modified, of course, by the Bull which allowed that through
explanations and additions it was possible to provide the second
group of articles with a Catholic sense. Joseph Koch hailed this
as a great advance in theological precision, but it may not have
been an advance in theological consistency. There seems to
be very little that separates the propositions of the first group
£1om those of the second. All of them are rara et subtilia, most
are initially paradoxical, and many in both groups sound in
explicit conflict with articles of Catholic teaching. If one is
going to admit the possibility of explanations and additions
modifying the ut verba sonant of the second set, it would seem
to be equally possible for many articles in the heretical group
as well. One has only to consider the two propositions relating
to negative theology, the one adjudged capable of defense
(# 26) the other ( # 28) as heretical, but both quite traditional,
to grasp this problem. Pope John, of course, judged differently;
but that does not mean that a present-day theologian, even
one within the Roman Catholic tradition, is not entitled to his
own view. Certainly, the condemnation of March, 1329, made
little difference to Eckhart personally. He had already gone to
whatever reward awaited the creator of German as a theological
language.
BERNARD

University of Chicago
Chicago, Illinois

McGINN

WILLIAM OF OCKHAM AND THE SELF

I

Introduction
N QUESTION 87 of the Summa Theologiae St. Thomas
wrote the following:

The intellect knows itself,. not by its essence but by its act. This
happens in two ways: in the first place, singularly, as when Socrates
or Plato perceives that he has an intellectual soul because he
perceives that he understands.
He indicates that there is a second kind of knowledge of the
intellectual soul which is universal in nature and which is
derived foom a knowledge of the intellectual act. This requires a careful and subtle inquiry. For the first kind of
knowledge, however, there is only required the presence of the
mind to itself.
The mere presence of the mind suffices for the first; since the mind
itself is the principle of action whereby it perceives itself by its own
presence. 1
Less than a century later William of Ockham could write the
following:
If we understand by the intellectual soul an immaterial. and incorruptible form which is totally in the whole and totally in each part,
we cannot know either through reason or experience that we possess
such a form?
S. Th., I, 87, 1.
Quodlibid Primum, Quaestio Decima, Strasbourg Edition, 1491. "Dico quod
intelligendo per animam intellectivam formam immaterialem incorruptibilem quae
tota est in toto et tota in qualibet parte, non potest sciri evidenter per rationem
vel experientiam quod talis forma sit in nobis, neque intelligere talem substantiam
proprium sit in nobis, nee quod talis anima sit forma corporis. Quidquid de
hoc senserit Aristoteles non curo, quia ubique dubitative videtur loqui. Sed ista
tria sola fide tenemus."
1

2

415

416

HARRY R. KLOCKER, S. J.

He adds that he cares not what Aristotle said about this
because he seems to be doubtful about it himself. Ockham
accepts the very existence of such an intellectual and incorruptible soul only on faith. The radical change in the position
taken by Ockham is startling. It is the purpose of this article
to trace the process which led Ockham to the position he took.

The Object of Knowledge
It seems that if anyone could be immediately aware of the
presence in man of an intellectual soul, that person was 'William
of Ockham. In order to safeguard the certainty of human
knowing he had carefully distinguished between intuitive and
abstract knowledge. He rejected the Thomistic contention that
the universal is known intellectually prior to the singular in
which it is grounded. If this were so, what possible certitude
could be had for the objectivity of such a universal? But if the
existing singular is known first, the ground for existential
objectivity is there. Not only is this true of material singulars
existing outside the mind, but it is also true of those acts of
the intellect and will which we elicit. They, too, can become
by a reflexive act immediate objects of our knowledge. Such
knowledge depends on a previous act of intuition of the object
of such acts of knowing, affection, joy, etc., but the intellect
can turn directly to the interior act and apprehend it intuitively.

The mind can know intuitively some things which are interior,
for example, acts of intellection and willing and delight independently of the senses, .... although some other intuitive knowledge
is presupposed.3
He is, however, careful to add that such intuitions are only of
the acts, not of habits or other intelligibles in the soul.
Now one could leap to a facile conclusion based on Ockham's
insistence that every reality is a unique singular and that from
1 Ibid., 14.
"Utrum intellectus noster pro statu isto cognoscat actus suos
intuitive ... dico quod sic. Et ratio est quia de cognitione intellectus et
volitionis formatur propositio contingens quae evidenter cognoscitur ab intellectu
nostro; puta, talis: Intellectio et volitio est."

WILLIAM OF OCKHAM AND THE SELF

417

one such singular another cannot be known. Hence, the argument could be made that, since each act of the soul is a
singular act, one is not justified in asserting the existence of
the soul as the subject of the act. After all, the act is not
the soul, and, as is well known, God by His absolute power
is able to sustain any act independent of its object or its
source. But it is not that simple, as we shall see.

The World of Singulars
It is a well known fact that Ockham had little use for any
sort of Platonic approach to reality. The world is a collection of unique singulars which are grasped intuitively by
both sense and intellect. These singulars are unique to such
an extent that there are no real relations connecting one with
another. Peter is similar to John, for example, simply because
he is Peter and John is John. He interprets Aristotle to mean
that such relations exist only in the mind and in no way outside
it. Even in the mind relations are simply connotative terms
which are used to signify two actual existents which are
uniquely themselves. The world, then, is a collection of
absolutes none of which ever necessarily demands another.
There is, therefore, no way in which one could proceed from the
knowledge of one thing to the knowledge of the existence of
another. Concepts are also just as independent of each other as
are the things themselves. As a matter of fact, the knowledge
of a thing itself could be had independently of the thing. One
need only recall here his teaching on the knowledge of nonexistents.4

Cause and Effect
It is not surprising that Ockham would have difficulty with
a theory of causality. Cause and effect, after all, demand some
sort of connection. But in a universe where each singular
thing is totally unrelated to any other thing, a theory of cause
and effect will have to undergo drastic revision. Now it must
4 Ibid.,

18; Quodlibet 6, 6. cf. also II Sent., 15, E.

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HARRY R. KLOCKER, S. J.

be noted that Ockham never denied causality. He grants that
it is evident that there are causes actually operating in the real
order. The question seems to be, rather, how a cause is known
and what, if any, validity the causal proposition has.
There are two principles which Ockham useSI in his discussions not only of cognition but also of causality. The first
principle is that only intuitive knowledge brings the mind into
contact with the real order of things. All other knowledge is
necessarily abstract. The second principle is that this real
order consists of concrete singular things and of them only.
These things are distinct from one another and are known as
such. If there are actually causes at work, and if causality
is something real, these will be known only in the mind's
intuitions of existing objects. In these intuitions of the real
order-and this order includes the immediate intuitions of the
mind's acts'- what the mind apprehends is either a conjunction
of two things or a succession of one thing after another. We
know fire. We see that when fire is brought into contact with
wood, the wood gets hot. Because in our experience this is
always so, we say that fire is the cause of heat. We are
aware of one mental act, say an act of cognition. We find
this always joined to an act of the will. Hence, we could say
that the act of cognition is the cause of the will act.
Now for Ockham the real and proper efficient cause was an
immediate cause. He had defined such a cause as one at the
presence of which an effect was produced. He makes it quite
clear that he is defining a cause in terms of being present.
Properly speaking, any cause is called a real cause at whose
presence the effect is produced. From this it follows that a
remote cause is not really a cause because it may not be present
in the production of the effect. Otherwise, Adam could be
called the cause of me. But that is false because non-being
cannot be called the cause of being. 5 What he means is that
5 II Se:nt., 5 K. " Proprie
loquendo causa dicta ad cujus praesentiam potest
poni effectus, et ipsa non posita non potest poni effectus, potest dici causw
immediata.
Ex hoc sequitur quod causa remota non est causa quia ad ejus
praesentiam non sequitur effectus: aliter Adam potest dici causa mei, quod

WILLIAM OF OCKHAM AND THE SELF

419

not only must cause and effect exist simultaneously, but they
must also be experienced simultaneously.
But is even this
simultaneous experience of what he calls cause and effect
enough to guarantee that the one thing is really the cause of
the other? The answer is no. When I say, for example, that
God is an immediate and principal cause, I can mean one of three
things: first, that God could produce all effects without the aid
of any creature; second, that when God cooperates with a
creature, He does so only because He does not wish to produce
any effect except through secondary causes; thirdly, the creature
could not produce the effect, unless it were helped by God. 6
Accordingly it cannot really be demonstrated that any effect is
produced by a secondary cause. Although in my experience it
always happens that, when fire is brought near to something
:flammable, it burns, it could still be true that fire is not the
cause of that combustion. God could so have arranged things
that He Himself would cause the burning when fire was
applied to something burnable. All that the cognitive intuition
gives me is the same sequence of events when two things are
brought into proximity with one another. 7 There is no intuition
of a causal influence. Hence, I can never asseTt with certitude
that the one thing is the cause of the other.
There seems to be no question that Ockham thought that
causality was at work in the world, but that it was impossible
to know concretely in what particular things causality was
verified. Add to this the fact that the things which I experience
are experienced as distinct from one another. The apprehension of one such object contains in itself no knowledge of
another object. However perfectly I may know one thing, that
non est verum: quia non ens non potest dici causa et entis et similiter causa et
effectus proprie loquendo simul sunt .... et si Deus concurrat cum causa secunda
utraque est immediata."
•Ibid., Q.
7 Ibid., R. " Ex hoc sequitur
quod non potest demonstrari quod aliquis effectus producitur a causa secunda; quia licet semper ad approximationem ignis
ad combustible sequatur combustio, cum hoc tamen potest stare quod ignis
non sit ejus causa, quia Deus potuit ordinasse quod semper ad praesentiam ignis
passo approximato ipse solus causaret combustionem."

420

HARRY R. KLOCKER, S. J.

knowledge will never lead me to the knowledge of another thing
distinct from it. 8 Even if it were granted that one particular
thing did cause another, it stiil is not necessary that the
knowledge of the one must cause in me the knowledge of the
other. As a matter of fact, it can never he known with
certainty that one thing is the cause of another. As we have
seen, the real and only cause may he God. Not only can God
do whatever any existing object can, there is also the possibility that in created nature an effect can be produced hy
another and unknown cause. 9
To the objection that once an effect is known, we can know
the cause from which such an effect naturally depends, Ockham
answers that we can only know in general that there is a
cause and that that cause must have some proper characteristics. What the cause is in particular, however, we can never
know. 10 From the existence and beauty of a painting we can
argue to the existence and ability of a painter. But we can
never know directly the particular painter who did the work.
The correspondence which is required between knowledge and
its object to have objective validity is of an entirely different
nature from that which exists between an effect and its cause.
Ockham's analysis of causality is almost totally empirical. To
identify any cause is to be able to find it immediately in
experience together with its effect. Causality, as a result, is
reduced to empirical association. There is just no way one can
argue to the nature of a cause or even to the existence of a
cause which is not given in experience.
8 Quaestio Prima Prologi, 9. (Edited by P. Boehner, O.F.M., Paderborn,
1939).
" Inter causam et .effectum est ordo et dependentia maxime essentialis, et tamen
ibi notitia incomplexa unius rei non continet notitiam incomplexam alterius rei.
Et hoc etiam quilibet in se experitur, quia quantumcumque perfecte cognoscat
aliquam rem, numquam cogitabit cogitatione simplici et propria de alia re, quam
numquam prius apprehendit nee p.er sensum nee per intellectum."
•Ibid. "Non obstante quod entitas unius rei sit causa entitatis alterius, non
tamen oportet quod notitia ·esset causa notitiae."
10 I Sent., I, 4. " Quocumque causato cognito potest cognosci quaelibet causa in
universali, puta quod habet finem et efficientem, et multae conditiones illarum
causarum possunt ex ilia re cognosci. Sed illud quod est causa non potest ex
quocumque causato in particulari cognosci vel cognitione propria sive equivalenti."

WILLIAM OF OCKHAM AND THE SELF

Moo and Soul
Ockham treats of man in a physical and material context,
but he makes the distinctions which are necessary for a Christian theologian. Like all other material beings man is composed
of matter and form. This material principle, unlike Aristotle's,
has an existence in its own right. It is not pure potentiality,
but even as matter is a reality. 11 Its potentiality is only toward
the various forms which will inform it. The first of these
forms is that of corporeality which makes it a body and which
it retains until this body itself decomposes. For even when
the sensible and intellectual forms have departed, man still
remains a body recognizable as such. The second form in man
is that of sensitivity. This form is really distinct from that of
corporeality and provides the body with its animal characteristics and powers. It is an extended form, as is obvious from its
different functions in different areas of matter. It functions
differently, for example, in the eye than it does in the ear, etc.
Hence, its extension throughout the body is obvious. That it
is really distinct from both the form of corporeality and the
intellectual form is equally clear. The first remains when the
sensitive form has corrupted, and at times, at least, it plays
a role contrary to that of the intellectual form. For the sensitive form can desire an object in direct contradiction to that
of the intellectual form. Such opposite activities cannot possibly be in the same species.12
When we come to the intellectual form, we find an entirely
different reality. Such a form is not quantitative, and it is,
11 Physics I, 7. "Et primo de materia.
Circa quam est sciendum quod materia
est quaedam res actualiter exis;tens in rerum natura, quae est in potentia
ad omnes formas substantiales, nullam habens necessario semper sibi inhaerentem
et inexistentem.
Et ideo non est imaginandum quod materia sit quid in
potentia tantum de se ... Sed materia est vere actu ex seipsa ita quod per
nullam virtutem potest esse in potentia ad esse in rerum natura ... licet semper
sit in potentia ad formam qua privatur."
12 Quodlibet II, 10. "Ad aliud dico quod in homine praeter animam intellectivam
est ponere aliam formam, scilicet sensitivam. Utrum anima sensitiva et intellectiva in homine distinguantur realiter, dico ad istam quaestionam quod sic."

422

HARRY R. KLOCKER, S. J.

therefore, not extended but tota in qualibet parte totius. 13 It is,
furthermore, spiritual, incorruptible, immortal, and the form
of the body. But, as we shall see, there is no way to demonstrate this philosophically, but it must be held only on faith.
These three forms, all informing matter, constitute the unique
unity which is man. And although Ockham insisted on this
numerical unity, he does seem to be in difficulty here. His criterion for a real distinction was always separability. He rejected
the Thomistic doctrine of a real distinction between principles
which were not separable. He ha.cl also rejected the Scotistic
distinction of distinct formalities in the unity of the same being.
But the three forms in man are obviously separable, as he
had previously pointed out. Hence, he could do nothing else
but admit their distinction as separate l'ealities and at the
same time insist on the numerical unity of the individual man.
It is here, perhaps, that his position becomes as weak as it ever
does. It is difficult to conceive how man remains a numerical
unity composed as he is of four different and separable realities.

Form and its Powers

If, however, there is a real distinction between the forms
themselves, there is no such distinction between a form and its
powers. It is true that we speak of a difference between seeing
and hearing and between intellect and will, as well as between
the acts of knowing and willing. But these are connotative
terms which are useful in speaking of such operations. In
reality they point to no such real distinctions. The soul sensing
is identical with what we designate as sense operations. The
soul knowing and willing is simply the soul in act which
expresses itself in various ways. The distinctions are all on the
side of the mind which distinguishes in order to clarify. One
could just as easily say that the soul knows by its will and wills
by its intellect. 14 At this point the problem which confronts
Ockham is this. He had granted that there is an immediate
Quodlibet I, 10.
" II Sent., 24, L.

18

WILLIAM OF OCKHAM AND THE SELF

423

intuition of existing material things as well as an immediate
intuition of the acts of the intellect and will. If one can directly
intuit an act of knowing, for example, and if this act of knowing
is identical with the intellectual soul, why cannot he also
admit an intuition of the intellectual soul? Why cannot he
agree with Aquinas that the soul knows itself in knowing its
act?

The Act and its Source

In the first place, in accord with his principle of economy
Ockham had refused to multiply powers and acts as really
distinct from their source. All such distinctions were merely
connotative. In the second place, each intuition regards its
immediate object and nothing else. From the knowledge of
one reality we can never argue to the existence of another. This
would require an habitual knowledge of the other, and in the
present case we are speaking of an original knowledge of the
soul for which there has been no previous knowledge. On
this ground any transition from one knowledge to another is
ruled out. In addition he had already made it clear that God
by His absolute power could sustain an act of knowing independently of the existence of its ordinary object. There
is no reason why this cannot be applied ·equally to the source of
the act. In the third place, his theory of causality presents
a real difficulty. While, as we have seen, he was willing to admit that there was causality at work in the world, he could
never argue from the existence of a particular to the existence
of a particular cause. Again God could well be the cause, or at
least some agent of whose existence we are totally unaware.
Ockham grants only an intuition of the act itself. That intuition can go no further. Hence, even if one can present plausible
reasons for the identity of the act and its source, that source
simply does not show up in the act. And no case can be
presented for the existence of something which cannot he
directly intuited. The certain existence of such a source, then,
must be held on faith. And if such a source cannot be demonstrated philosophically, then nothing about its function in the

HARRY R. KLOCKER, S. J.

human individual can be demonstrated. It might well function
as a form. But it might also function simply as. a mover. How
could anyone possibly know?
In the tenth question of the first Quodlibet Ockham treats
the problem directly. It seems possible to demonstrate, he
says, that the intellectual soul is: the form of the body. We
experience intellection in us. This intellection is an operation
of man. Therefore, its efficient cause and source is also in us.
Furthermore, this cannot be some separated intelligence because
we could in no way experience the operations of such an
intelligence. Hence, the subject of such an operation must be
in man. Now it cannot be the matter; therefore, it must be
the form.
Immediately, however, he sees two difficulties. The first is
that the intellectual soul could be that through which we
understand and still not be the form of the hotly. We could
simply be attributing the term, form, to such a principle, as we
attribute the term, rower, to one who rows. The soul could
be a mover rather than the proper form of the body. In that
case we could still say that man understands through his intellectual soul. In the second place, he states flatly that neither
through experience nor reason can we know that a spiritual
principle which we call the soul exists in us. We hold this
solely on faith. And even if we directly experience acts of
knowing and willing and believe through faith that the subject
of such acts is spiritual and incorruptible, still we could just
as well conclude from experience that the subject of such acts
is an extended and corruptible form. 15

15 Quodlibet I, 10.
"Sunt etiam aliqua dubia quia videtur quod anima intellectiva quam ponimus secundum fidem informare <'orpus non sit tota in toto,
nee tota in qualibet parte ... Ad principale renderent sequentes rationes naturales, ,
quod experimur intellectionem in nobis qui est actus formae corruptibilis et
corporeae. Et diceret consequenter quod talis in tellectio recipietur in forma
extensa. Non autem experimur istam intellectionem quae est operatio propria
substantiae immaterialis. Et ideo per intellectionem non concludimus illam substantiam incorruptibilem esse in nobis tamquam formam."

WILLIAM O:Ji' OCKHAM AND THE SELF

425

Conclusion

It is interesting to note that some four hundred years later
David Hume could write the following on the identity of the
self.
When I turn my reflection on myself, I can never perceive this self
\vithout some one or more perceptions; nor can I ·ever perceive anything but the perceptions. It is the composition of these, therefore, which forms the self.
We can conceive a thinking being to have either many or few perceptions, Suppose the mind to be reduced even below the life of an
oyster. Suppose it to have only one perception, as of thirst or
hunger. Consider it in that situation. Do you conceive anything
but merely that perception? Have you any notion of self or substance? If not, the addition of other perceptions can never give you
that notion.
The annihilation,, which some people suppose to follow upon
death, and which entirely destroys this self, is nothing but an
extinction of all particular perceptions; love and hatred, pain and
pleasure, thought and sensation. These, therefore, must be the
same with the self; since the one cannot survive the other. 16

It would be easy to say at this point that, when Ockham and
Hume had finished their analyses of man, man had lost both
his unity and his soul. But, of course, there is more to it than
that. Ockham was not just a philosopher, but much more
radically a theologian and a Christian. And like any Augustinian Christian theologian he was interested in pointing out the
inadequacy of human reason when left to itself or when dealing
with the empirical situation. The ratio inferior was just that.
Unless it was subjected to the ratio superior, enlightened by
faith and the Divine Light Itself, there was very little that
human reason working by itself could achieve in the way of certain truth. Aristotle was there, and to a certain extent he accepted 'him. But to pretend that man in his present condition
could find salvation and ultimate truth through the teachings
of the Stagirite was simply nonsense. What after all were
16

Hume, David, A Treatise of Human Nature, Part IV, Section 6.

426

HARRY R. KLOCKER, S. J.

faith and grace meant for, if not to sustain a darkened human
intellect and a wayward will,. and raise them to the level
where man could truly and really understand and consistently pursue the good? In Ockham's eyes Christianity
was not just something superadded to an already noble reason. It was rather that without which man could never understand himself, his world, or his God with any degree of certitude
whatever. The conclusion to so many questions is consistently
the same: " This we hold only by faith."
Ockham, then, does not abdicate certitude. He is simply
unable to find very much of it on the philosophical level. He
is convinced of this, and this conviction is behind all his
criticism of Aquinas, Scotus, Henry of Ghent, et al. In the end
Ockham is much more an Augustinian than he is a sceptic.
He has been called often enough a philosophical sceptic, and
from that abstract viewpoint he wa;s. But it is also true that
Ockham himself would not welcome such a designation as a
total description of his work. He never stopped with a philosophical scepticism. He uses it to point to where man must
go, if he is to achieve the certitude he seeks. If an empiricist
is unwilling to go beyond his empiricism, then the result, in
Ockham's mind, is quite clear. And it seems that historically
he has been right. The quotation from Hume represents
Hume's total position. It is not Ockharn's.
HARRY

Marquette University
MuwaukM, Wisoonsin

R. KLOCKER,

s. J.

BETWEEN BEING AND NOTHINGNESS: THE
RELEVANCY OF THOMISTIC HABIT

T

HE PURPOSE OF THIS PAPER is to compare St.
Thomas's Treatise on Habits with two contemporary
philosophies: the analytical philosophy of Gilbert
Ryle and the existential approach of Jean-Paul Sartre. In
comparing Aquinas's notion of habits with these contemporary
views, and in relating his theory to a general psychology of
values, the paper, it is hoped, will establish the value of St.
Thomas's Treatise for today's studies.
St. Thomas deals with the general notion of " habits " in
Questions 49-54 of the first part of the second part of the
Summa. Throughout his Treatise he expands on Aristotle's
formulation of" habit "in the Categories, Ethics, and M etaphysics.
In general, " habit " is subsumed under the category of
quality. The etymology of the word might suggest that other
categories, especially quantity, are involved in the meaning of
"habit" since the word is derived from " to have" or" possess."
Actually, the Greek verbal noun etii;; drawn from exeiv has
three main senses: (1) possession, literally "to have"; (2) a
state of being; and (S) the wearing of some apparel. It is the
second meaning that Aristotle intends when in Greek construction the verb E.xeiv is used with an adverb. In such cases,
the literal phrase" I have well" means" I am in a good state." 1
St. Thomas does not fail to observe this meaning of habit as a
qualitative state of being. The" having" that is at stake here
is not the having of friends, or money, or clothes, but rather the
state or condition of a being disposed to act in one way or
another. Habits in this sense dispose our powers of acting.
1

Aristotle, Metaphysics, trans. by C. Kirwan

427

(Oxford Edition, 1971), p. 170.

428

JOSEPH

J. ROMANO

Habits thus are lasting and become ingrained as a " second
nature." 2
This quality of an habitual state arrived at through ordered
action applies throughout nature in general. Thomas refers
to a passage in Aristotle's History of Animals (X, I) in which
a being is judged to be healthy when it is capable of performing
the actions characteristic of a healthy being. The point is that
if "nature" is act-oriented, then "habits" which are a "state
of nature " are also act-oriented.
When this meaning of " habit" is applied to human nature,
however, an interesting paradox is raised. Habits are necessary
determinants of actions if human beings are to arrive at any
kind of fulfillment. But to say that habits are necessary implies
a double-edged sword of value. On one side, we see human
nature laden with all sorts of possibilities whereby a human
being can intellectualize on and choose from a wide range of
objects that far surpasses the capabilities of any animal nature.
On the other side, unlike Divine Nature, the human being must
habitualize his actions if his nature is to develop continually
and grow toward a state of fulfillment.
St. Thomas' s notion of habits as necessary fits the traditional
Greek model of human nature, that in a sense is as existential
as it is traditional. The necessity of habits places human existence in that Greek predicament that is paradoxically a blessing
and a curse. Human nature is located somewhere between the
animals and the gods.
On the cognitive level, human beings are intelligent enough
to ask an infinite range of questions, but ignorant of absolute
answers. On the volitional level, where habit plays an
important role, human beings find themselves in a similar
half-way house. Unlike the animals whose upper limits of
development are established by their physical and instinctive
natures, a human being can perfect himself in proportion to the
habits that he develops. And yet-poor fellow that he is-he
must employ habitual acts if he is to approximate some level of
•Aristotle, Ethics, X, 7.

THE RELEVANCY

OF THOMISTIC

HABIT

perfection. Habits imply a nature that is good enough to have
room for growth, but not perfect enough to dispense 1-vith a
rigor of repeated actions.
This necessity of habits arises from the indeterminant character of human powers. Put in positive terms, certain human
powers are related to many different objects. An habitual ordering is necessary, then, if powers are to operate consistently in a
way that brings human nature in alignment with its goals.
Several significant points are implied in this human need
for habitual acts. First, it reveals a theory of human nature
that deals in complexity rather than simplicity.
A simplicity of nature is manifested by a single fixed way
of acting. The determined nature of matter exemplifies this
type of simplicity. Divine simplicity, on the other hand, is
manifested by a being" whose substance is its own operations." 3
Human beings partake in neither type of simplicity. To be
sure, as part of the living, physical world, human beings display
nutritive powers. But such powers are" fixed" in their actions.
No one speaks of the habit of growing, or the habit of cell
1'.'eproduction.
Thomas notes that Aristotle had ranged such nutritive acts
on the non-rational side of human life, and adds that Aristotle
also included sensitive powers in the non-rational class. Here,
however, habits do dispose our sensitive power which in a sense
share in reason inasmuch as we urge ourselves to be moderate
in pleasures and courageous in the face of fear and danger. The
critical sensitive powers that need habitual attention, as it were,
are labeled by Thomas. "irascible" and " concupiscible " powers, and courage and moderation are the respective moral habits
that guide them. 4
The complexity of human powers and corresponding habits
heightens as one moves to a consideration of intellectual powers
of knowing and willful powers of choosing. But the question
of relevancy is at issue here, and one wonders about the rele8 Aquinas, Summa
Theologica, I, II; Q. 49, art. 4.
• Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I, II; Q. 56, art. 4.

430

JOSEPH

J. ROMANO

vancy, psychological or otherwise, of such terms as "irascible"
and " concupiscible " powers.
Throughout the passages on habits that I have been outlining, Thomas makes numerous references to Aristotelian texts.
In the present context, he draws from these texts in establishing
that some habits do relate to our non-rational sensitive powers,
specifically, the moral habits of courage and moderation.
The natural seeking of physical pleasures, which Thomas
calls the concupiscible power and which is governed by the
habit of moderation (temperantia), admits of scores of examples
of a practical kind. The hedonistic theme has been and still
is a popular subject of literature, philosophy, and science.
The irascible power is called into play when danger, real
or imagined, is present. In Greek, the root word is " evJLO<; "
which meant " spirited " or " high spirited as manifested in
anger" (ira) .5 Aristotle, as quoted by Thomas, refers to these
powers as being part of man's non-rational life since we have
them in common with dumb animals. The difference is that in
a sense these powers share in rational planning.
This spirited nature of man-and animals-might appear to
be a manifestation of courage. Indeed the Homeric legends
equated such high-spirited actions with bravery. For when
faced with danger man rises up in his wrath and strikes out
with " blood boiling," as Homer puts it. But spirit is impetuous
and of itself ungoverned. The truly courageous person assays
the danger and turns fear into positive value. Spirit can inspire
courage, but it is not synonymom; with courage. Animals are
not courageous, for " they rush in upon danger when spurred by
pain and are blind to the actual dangers tha.t await them." 6
Some unscrupulous people may be highly-spirited but hardly
courageous. Aristotle puts it well: " The real motive of courageous men is the nobility of courage." If impetuous wrath
in response to danger, and if stubborn refusal to admit to danger
were equaitable with courage, then, on that account, "even
asses would be brave when they are hungry, for no blows will
• Aristotle, Ethics, III, 8.
• Ibid., III, 8.

THE RELEVANCY

OF THOMISTIC

HABIT

431

make them stop grazing." 1 Courage is the habit that can welldispose our irascible powers.
The recognition of a human nature beset with a complexity
of capabilities at all levels of acting, aiming at any number of
goals, makes habitual action all the more imperative if one is to
shape out some meaning in his life.
A second significant point is that this complexity of habits
and powers need not imply a bifurcation of nature. Thomas,
again following Aristotle, does distinguish rational habits of
the understanding and will from the non-rational habits that
dispose our emotive and attitudinal acts. But far from effecting
any separation of mind and body, Thomas clearly rejects any
such notion.
In discussing how habits influence our non-rational acts, he
refers to Aristotle's distinction between the rational and nonrational aspects .of human life. Aristotle suggests that the
distinction is much like viewing a curved line as being either
convex or concave. It all depends on which side you focus on,
but there is only one curved line. 8
Habits, especially moral habits, are not, as Thomas puts it,
a freedom from the pleasure-pain confrontation of our emotive
states, but rather, habits involve the direct engagement of
such acts concerning their right use i.n the right way at the
right time. 9 The mark of a good person is not a stoic denial of
pleasures and pains, but an habitual ordering of actions that
gives us assurance against any fanatical seeking of pleasures
or a frantic avoidance of pain that will rob us of our dignity .10
Furthermore, pleasures and pains that accompany our actions
provide the very index of habits that lead to character development. Feelings of self-satisfaction that accompany acts that
regulate physical pleasures are indicators of the development
of moderation, while on the other hand irksome and annoying
feelings that accompany attempts at control are warning signs
Ibid., III, 8.
Ibid., I, 13.
•Aquinas, op. cit., Q. 59, art. fl.
10 Aristotle, Ethics, II, 8.
7

8

JOSEPH

J. ROMANO

of impending excess. Anyone who has tried to "kick the
habit" of smoking will readily recognize these pleasure-pain
symptoms. Increasing ease and lessening of anxiety in facing
crisis situations are sure signs of courage, while the opposite is
indicative of a cravenly disposition.
This view of habits as disposing non-rational powers not only
avoids charges of a mind-body dichotomy, but also is free from
the worn out exclamation of " occult causes."
Gilbert Ryle, in submitting the terms " dispositions," " habits," and " tendencies " to the test of ordinary usage, typifies
the vagueness in identifying perpetrators of " occult causes."
In the relevant passage, Ryle is justifying the usage of such
words as " capacities," " tendencies," " liabilities," and " pronenesses." He considers a general objection that such talk is
never about anything actual. The argument goes " that the
world does not contain over and above what exists and happens,
some other things which are mere would-be things and could-be
happenings." 11
Ryle admits that the objection seems to have merit. After
all, to say of -a sleeping man, that he can speak French, does
appear at one and the same time to posit an attribute and put
that attribute into " cold storage," as Ryle phrases it. The
problem is slipped with linguistic ease, however, when Ryle
tells us that affirmative, indicative sentences which attribute
these potentialities are either true or false, so that nothing is
"put into cold storage" beyond the reach of logical truth
value.
Ryle notes that .the objection to the statement that " a
sleeping man can speak French" becomes a valid objection
when it is leveled against " Old Faculty Theories " which construed dispositional words as denoting occult agencies or causes.
Such theories posit " existing things or processes taking place
in a sort of limbo world." 12 Exponents of "Old Faculty Theories " are not named, but obviously being in limbo is worse than
being in cold storage.
11
12

G. Ryle, Concept of Mind (New York, 1949), p. 119.
Ibid., pp. 119-l!W.

THE RELEVANCY

OF THOMISTIC

HABIT

433

Ryle goes on to say that sentences containing words like
" might," " could," and " would " do not report limbo facts,
but rather have different jobs to perform in reporting matters
of fact.
Fine. No one is in disagreement. The statement," A sleeping
man can speak French," is either true or false. The modal
force of " can " does not free the sentence from the icy grip
of the excluded middle principle.
More at issue here is whether Thomas and Aristotle, whom
he followed in developing the Treatise on Habits, are guilty
of speaking about anything more or less than matters of fact,
and whether or not they deserve membership in the " Old
Faculty Club."
It was mentioned above that, in developing the fact of human
habits, Aristotle engaged in an analysis of language, employing
verbal derivations in moving from the infinite €xeiv to the noun
From there he runs through a host of meanings that we
can assume were employed in ordinary Greek usage. Thomas
does likewise in Latin, developing "habitus" from "habere."
It seems no small matter that verbal nouns are used in talking
about human tendencies and capabilities. It would seem that
the difficulty with a faculty-psychology would involve the
substantializing of powers, so that human beings would become
harborers of hidden entities causing them to act this way or
that way.
We have already seen the figurative example of the convex
and concave curve that distinguishes rational and non-rational
actions of human beings. The critical terms for " rational "
and "non-rational" in the Greek from which Thomas draws
are: A.6yov exeiv--literally " having a plan " and aX.oyov
€xeiv--having no plan or principle.
Thomas notes that habits are called qualities because they
relate more to the rational side than the non-rational. In thus
sharing " in a plan," habits are not fixed and determined, but
rather dispose for good or ill. In any case, it is always actions,
whether nutritive, sentient, or rational, that are the touchstone
of those distinctions of nature. Furthermore, these actions are

434

JOSEPH

J, ROMANO

very real and expressed as matters of fact. To distinguish
" habit " from " action " is not to lose sight of the very
real habit-of-acting, i. e., the end product of establishing a
permanent disposition through practice. The sleeping man that
can speak French, can speak French only insofar as he actually
practices speaking French. Otherwise, he may wake up one day
unable to order dinner at his favorite French restaurant.
Habits are formed by repeated acts of a similar type. We
learn by doing. We become builders by building. We become
just by doing just acts; brave by doing brave acts. The actions
through which any habit is gained are the same as those through
which by non-use it is also lost, as is the case with any skill. If
people were born good or bad builders, then no teachers of skill
would be needed. 13
So it is with moral habits. Since they are formed as a result
of corresponding actions, it is necessary to control the quality
of activities in order to establish the second-nature consistency
of habit. This increased consistency of habitual action is a
qualitative augmentation whereby our actions (and our character) grow better, not bigger. 14
Such is the force of habit. William James remarked that habit
is "an invisible law, as strong as gravitation." 15
James says this with no fear of an occult quality charge, nor
does anyone so charge him. Attributing a statement to the
Duke of Wellington, James echoes that habit is more than
second nature; it is " ten times nature! " 16
Habits make actions easy to perform, freeing us for higher
pursuits. James urges us to launch ourselves with as strong and
decided an initiative as possible; never suffer an exception to
occur until the new habit is securely rooted in our lives. Continuity of performance is paramount. Habit is not sentiment
but will, and is developed for good or ill: " The hell to be enAquinas, <Yp. cit., Q. 52, art. 3; Aristotle, Ethics, II, 1, 2.
Aquinas, op. cit., Q. 52, art. 1.
15 William James, Principles of Psychology, Vol. 1 (Dover Edition, New York,
1950), p. H!2.
1 • Ibid., p. 120.
13
14

THE RELEVANCY

OF THOMISTIC

HABIT

435

dured hereafter, of which theology tells, is no worse than the
hell we make for ourselves in this world by habitually fashioning
our character in the wrong way .... We are spinning our fates,
good or evil, and never to be undone." 17
I would suggest that Thomas makes the better distinctions in
his Treatise on Habits than the apocalyptic James, who drifts
indiscriminately from speaking of habits as" grooving out brain
tissues " to becoming a qualitatively better person, only to
return again to speak of habits as a material law.
However, the mechanistic implications of William James's
treatment of habits need not be inconsistent with his other
assertions of purpose, intention and design. One would simply
wish that clearer distinctions be made. Thomas's distinctions
between habits relating to sentient acts and those related to
intellectual acts allow for a predictability of action without
ruling out chance and design. Without such distinctions a
simple mechanistic psychology might ensue with implicit denials
of purpose and deliberation.
Ryle offers an admirable refutation of the" Bogey of Mechanism " which purports to rule out intelligence and purpose. The
fear of this mechanistic bogey-man rests on the possibility that
all biological, psychological, and sociological laws will be reduced
to mechanical laws, and that somehow this " reduction " will
cancel out intelligence and purpose.
Ryle retorts that it may well be the case that physicists will
find the answers to all physical questions, but he quickly adds
that not all questions are physical questions. Laws govern,
they do not ordain. "Laws of nature are not fiats." 18
Every move in a chess game is governed by the rules, but not
one move is ordained by the rules. Knowing the rules, therefore, one can predict that the bishop will move in a diagonal
direction along squares of the same color. But one cannot
deduce from the rules whether or not I shall move the bishop,
nor how far if I do choose to move it. " There is plenty of
11
18

Ibid., p. Hl7.
G. Ryle, op. ait., p. 76.

436

JOSEPH

J. ROMANO

room for us to display cleverness and stupidity and to exercise
deliberation and choice." 19
It should be kept in mind that Ryle's logical tour de force
that established the compatability of mechanism and purpose is
aimed at those " alarmist faculty-theorists " who believe that
nothing less than a will-entity is sufficient to counter-act the
blind action of a mechanistic type. Ryle fails to mention that his
argument also applies to" alarmist mechanists" who would rule
out plausible accounts of deliberation and purpose. Thomas's
Treatise on Habits would seem to mediate the dispute that is
given a one-sided treatment by Ryle. St. Thomas offers no
mechanistic view of habits, and yet habits do afford a degree of
predictability concerning our actions without cancelling out
deliberation and choice. Habits are the hard-earned results of
many deliberate acts which, paradoxically, cut down, so to
speak, on deliberation time. Nevertheless, second nature always
remains a free nature.
I suggest then that Thomas offers a theory of habits that
avoids both meaningless occult entities of an I-know-not-what
kind, and a mechanistic view that is indifferent to deliberation
and purpose. He gives an account of human dispositions that
are readily recognized in ourselves and in others. These dispositions are important and indeed necessary for the development of any skill and more importantly for the development of
moral character.
But far from speaking of habits as second nature, how does
Thomas's view of habits compare with an existential philosophy
that eschews all talk of essence or human nature? In challenging
traditional de£nitions of human nature, Sartre charges tradition
with establishing an unrealistic universal archetype, whereby
" each man is a particular example of a universal concept,
man." 20 In this tradition, universality of essence blankets the
" wild man, the natural man, the bourgeois man " all under
the same definition of man, all having the same basic qualities.
Ibid., p. 77.
•• J.-P. Sartr.e, Essays in Existentialis.m (Citadel Press, New York, 1965), p. 85.

1•

THE RELEVANCY

OF THOMISTIC

HABIT

437

This conclusion follows, Sartre continues, because in this tradition " the essence of man precedes the historical existence that
we find in nature." 21
Sartre's well-known counterview of existence preceding essence is based on the nihilating aspect of human consciousness.
To say that existence precedes essence is to say that " first of
all, man exists, turns up, appears on the scene, and only afterwards defines himself. If man, as the existentialist conceives
him, is indefinable, it is because at first he is nothing." 22
In his popular defense of existentialism as a humanism, Sartre
proceeds from here to give an account of human responsibility
that would engender little argument. " Man is nothing else
but what he makes of himself. Such is the first principle of
existentialism." 23
It is a principle of " subjectivity " that affords the human
being a " greater dignity than a stone or table .... Man is at the
start a plan which is aware of itself, rather than a patch of moss,
a piece of garbage, or a cauliflower .... I may want to belong
to a political party, write a book, get married, but all that is
only a manifestation of an earlier, more spontaneous choice that
is called ' will.' But if existence really does precede essence,
man is responsible for what he is." 24
Now while Sartre claims that the first principle of existentialism is the axiological statement, " Man is nothing else but what
he makes of himself," it would seem that by his own account
there is a prior principle that he himself states: the phenomenological account that " at first man is nothing."
The statement, of course, is carried over from the technical
pour-soi language of Being and Nothingness which expreS'sesthe
for-itself character of human consciousness, a consciousness that
is literally " out there " and metaphorically expressed as a
" wind blowing toward things "or as " a being who hurls himself
toward the future."
IbiiL., p. 35 .
•• lbiiL., pp. 35-36.
2 • IbiiL., p. 36.
2 • Ibid., p. 36.

21

488

JOSEPH

J. ROMANO

Metaphors as,ide, the for-itself consciousness that is the
human being is literally nothing, and this is the first principle
from which Sartre derives his notion of responsibility.
The temptation to compare--mutatis mutandi-Sartre's
prime distinction between being-in-itself and being-for-itself
with a Parmenidean being-non-being distinction is overwhelming. In Aristotelian language, this latter distinction is seen as
an oversimplification, since "non-being" need not literally
mean "nothing," but rather "potentially something."
In Sartre's case, once committed to the negativity of consciousness as an absolute "nothing," a pure spontaneity of
of freedom arises that disallows any continuity of action. Man
must invent himself anew at every moment. Being conscious,
man projects himself beyond himself. He is the center of his
own transcendence. He leaves the being of yesterday behind
the being of today, and the being of today is left behind the
being of tomorrow. He surpasses himself constantly through
a self-transcendence.
Sartre's notion of spontaneous freedom seems to be immediately prescriptive in its obligatory tone. "Value haunts freedom," 25 Sartre claims, and this haunting of freedom by value
takes on the verdict of a condemnation. The thrust of these
immediately prescriptive acts heightens when Sartre tells us
that not only must we decide for ourselves the values of each
act, but at one and the same time we choose for all men. " In
fact, in creating the man that we want to be, there is not a
single act which does not at the same time create an image of
man as we think he ought to be." 26
And yet, while these acts are immediately prescriptive,
ironically, no norms can be prescribed without being guilty
of bad faith. Having no nature, man has no moral nature.
Against this view, we offer an alternative AristotelianThomistic view of human nature, a nature that is not defined
de facto and ab initio, nor a nature entailing consciousness, that
25 Being and Nothingness,
trans. Hazel Barnes (Philosophical Library,
York, 1956), p. 94.
2 •" Existentialism
Is a Humanism," op. vit., p. 37.

New

THE RELEVANCY

OF THOMISTIC

HABIT

489

is literally "nothing." Rather it is a nature laden with potentialities, dispositions, habits. Habits as potential dispositions-to-act avoid both a defined being of an en-soi type and a
view of man as negativity that disallows any continuity of
action. Habits are between Being and Nothingness.
The habitually-formed acts that form the quality of aman are
no less free than the spontaneous thrusts of the Sartrean type.
Deliberation is a prerequisite for habitually-formed acts. Thomas could not be more clear in denying the power of habitual
action in en-soi types such as stones and tables, patches of
moss and cauliflower. Even animals, strictly speaking, do not
have habitual powers. All beings of this kind do have defined
natures and totally predictable acts.
We said above that St. Thomas's notion of habits affords a
degree of predictability without ruling out deliberation and
choice; therefore, it is not a predictability in the sense of
Sartrean" bad faith" in which one denies his own anguish-laden
freedom, but a predictability that implies more of a reliability
on self and others.
Spontaneity in action that is habit-formed is not necessarily
a brand new moment of responsibility never before faced, but
rather a facility and ease in facing similar responsibilities. Such
spontaneity is the product of past deliberative acts, but in no
sense diminishes the present freedom. In this case " spontaneity" as "reliability" means we can count on ourselves and
others when crisis-situations arise. One would imagine that
it was this kind of reliability that Sartre looked for in his
colleagues of the resistance movement when it was imperative
to distinguish friend from foe, hero from coward. A vacuous
human nature whose isolated uniqueness that renders all loverelations as either sadistic seduction or masochistic surrender
may well be a " hell that is other people." But a human nature
that is potentially disposed to good or evil at least gives us a
fighting chance of establishing good habits in consonance with
the increasing facility of good-faith deliberative acts.
The distinction between habit as a potential thrust and the
right or wrong termination of those disposed acts raises another

440

JOSEPH J. ROMANO

interesting comparison. It was mentioned that Sartre's version
of consciousness as nothingness immediately places the human
being in a prescriptive setting of deciding what the individual
ought to be and what others ought to be.
Thomas's view of habits, on the other hand, allows for a
meaningful distinction of a descriptive and prescriptive type.
Initially, his analysis of human habits is descriptive. Nature
is described (not defined) as having certain capacities to act
in this way or that way. Repeated acts of similar types form
a constancy of action that engenders a constancy of character.
Habits, as influencing powers-of-acting, do not define human
nature but are simple descriptions of one's possibilities.
Habits are given a prescriptive force when Thomas considers
moral habits as virtues. 21 Here, the discussion moves from
what man is capable of doing through habitual acts, to what
he ought to do if a good life is to be attained.
But I will rest my case here, claiming that Thomas's theory
of habits fares well when compared with some current philosophies which try to express certain aspects of human life.
JOSEPH

Cabrini College,
Radnor, Pennsylvania.

2 • Op.

cit., Q. 55-58.

J. ROMANO

THE SIN OF ANGELICISM REVISITED

A

NGELS HAVE FALLEN, theologically as well as
philosophically, on hard times.

Thus, for Paul Tillich they are structures rather than
beings, " ... concrete-poetic symbols of the structures and powers
of being." 1 For him they are not personal beings at all,
but " ... supra-idividual structures of goodness and supra-individual structures of evil. Angels and demons a;re mythological
names for constructive and destructive powers of being ... " 2
There are various reasons why angels have fallen, theologically, on hard times. For example, one of the reasons for the
theory of angels in St. Thomas Aquinas is to provide an analogue for the sort of existence and knowledge enjoyed by the
disembodied soul. Indicative of this fact is that about a third
of the fifteen questions in the appropriate section of the Summa
Theologiae are devoted to angelic knowledge: what knowing
would be like without sensation. 3 However, contemporary
theologians tend to speak less of the immortality of the soul and
more of the resurrection of the body. They tend to dispense
with the notion of the soul as a vehicle of personal identity
between the death of the individual person and the general
resurrection. 4
The last major philosopher to consider angels within the
Systematic Theology (University of Chicago Press, 1967) I, 260.
Ibid., II, 40.
8 Like the angels, the human soul will know through divinely imparted
species.
ST I, 89, 8.
•Cf. Oscar Cullmann, lmmortaUty of the Soul or
of the Dead?,
(London: Epworth, 1958). Cf. my "The Problem of the Soul in Contemporary
Thought," American Benedictime
19 (1968) 24-81. Similarly, although
the Vatican II document "Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modem
World" does speak of man's soul and of its immortality, the general orientation
of the philosophical anthropology in this document is hardly in this direction.
Documents of Vatican II (New York: Guild, 1966), p. 212.
1
2

441

442

THE SIN OF ANGELICISM

REVISITED

context of his thought in a thematic way would seem to have
been Kant. In his Lectures on Metaphysics he insists that
" The spirit world constitutes a special, real world; it is an
intelligible world, which must be distinguished from the sensible one." 5 Even in the philosophy of his critical period Kant
allows for the existence of angels as noumena, as things-inthemselves, problematic but in no way self-contradictory. 6 He
even describes the sort of knowledge they would have, namely
intellectual intuition. 7
There are reasons why Kant takes angels into serious philo- ·
sophical account, and not simply his pietist Lutheran upbringing. He felt obliged to reject the spirit-world view
(Pneumatologie) of Emanuel Swedenborg, namely that manhaving-reason should be able to see in his reason beings-havingreason, that is, angels. This rejection surely plays a role in
Kant's denial of intellectual intuition for man. 8 Nevertheless,
•Ed. Politz, 257.
6 Kritik der reinen Vernunft, B 310.
7 " For we cannot
judge in regard to the intuitions of other thinking beings,
whether they are bound by the same conditions as those which limit our
intuition and which for us are universally valid." K.d.r.V., A 27, B 43. It is
interesting to note in an earlier work, " Triiume eines Geistersehers (1766),
directed against Emanuel Swedenborg, that although Kant has no difficulty
rejecting the notion that angels could somehow be present to our outer senses
(W erke in seeks Biinden, I, 950), at least in this work he does not have a
solid reason for rejecting a possible " inner conjunction with the spirit world "
in inner sense (imdJ., p. 975). By this time Kant had not yet developed time
as the form of inner sense, and with it rejected any form of intellectual
intuition for the human understanding.
(It is instructive to note that !the
majority of the references to intellectual irltuition are in the second edition of the
first Critique. Cf. K.d.r.v., B XXVII, B XL, B 72, B 159).
8 Kant's
animadversions to Swedenborg's clairvoyance are clearly stated: in
non datur hiatus. There is a principle of continuity in
mundo non datur
appearance which forbids any leap in a series (from present to future) or a
hiatus in spatial representation.
In other words, given the chain of appearance, an actual insight into the future before the present has linked up with
it is not possible. Neither will the chain of appearances permit insight into
what is happening in a causally unconnected sector of space. Finally, an intellectual intuition into things-in-themselves, into mysterious agencies which would
make things happen or which might indicate an unconnected happening elsewhere or in the futur.e, cannot be an object of possible experience. As Kant
indicates, " A concept to which no assignable intuition corresponds is nothing."
K.d.r.V., A 290, B 847.

GEORGE J. SEIDEL,

O.S.B.

443

Kant agrees with Swedenborg that an angel is a being (Wesen)
having reason. An angel would be a person, if a supra-natural
person.
Now in comparing Kant's angelology with a much earlier one,
namely that of Thomas Aquinas, one immediately notes a
fundamental difference. For Aquinas an angel is a natural
thing; it has a nature. Indeed, each one has a separate nature,
or better, constitutes a separate species. This is the basis for
St. Thomas's explanation for the fall of the bad angels. The
bad angel possessed a natural perfection in potency to a supernatural good, which supernatural good it refused, preferring,
selfishly, to enjoy its own natural perfection, which natural
perfection it had right from the start of its existence. 9 Since
for Kant nature means Newtonian nature, an angel could not
but be a supra-natural person.
We come here to one of the reasons why angels have fallen,
philosophically, on hard times. According to the Angelic Doctor
it is necessary to posit such incorporeal creatures for the perfection of the universe (ad perfectionem universi) existing
between God and man. 10 We recognize here one of the presuppositions to Aquinas's thought which he took over from the
neo-Platonic tradition, namely that of the Great Chain of Being.
The chain is pretty well broken by the time of Kant, split
9 De Malo XVI, 3.
Cf. James Collins, The Thomistic Philo;iophy of Angels
(Washington D.C.: Catholic Universi!ty of America, 1947), pp. 25Hl56. It is
extremely interesting to note that Hegel views the fall of Lucifer in a similar
fashion. Sin, according to Hegel, is self-centered being for self, withdrawal
into self (Phenomenology of Spirit, Miller, tr., p. 474). The angel, as " the
thought of Spirit immediately existent" (ibid., p. 469), is posited immediately
as an individual self, not for its.elf, not existing as spirit (that is, it is innocent).
There is an othering of self as withdrawal into self. It becomes knowing as such.
With this there is a self-centeredness of the existent consciousness (that is,
sin). In the good angel, which immediately replaces the Son of Light (Lucifer),
the divine being counts as essence, while natural exietence (italics mine) and the
self as unessential; in the bad angel, on the other hand, it is the opposite (ibid.,
p. 470). In other words, in Hegel, as in Aquinas, the bad angel chooses to
enjoy its natural cr.eated self rather than God.
1 ° Cf. ST I, 50, l, c.
That there might be beings knowing the divine goodness,
as well as simply existing. CG II, 46.

444

THE SIN OF ANGELICISM

REVISITED

into two distinct realms, that of phenomenon and that of
noumenon. The chain was still holding in the philosophy of
John Locke, who felt that there should be a continuity of species
ascending from man up to God.11
One of the difficulties which contemporary philosophers have
with angels is simply with the terms whereby they are
defined. For example, a.n angel is called an immaterial substance. Tracing the history of substance from Locke's "I know
not what" to Kant's concept of substance, which is little more
than that, namely a mere concept of the understanding, indicates the difficulty of establishing the ontological status of the
angel in those terms. Further, in the light of contemporary
physics and the mass-energy convertibility the view of angels
as non-material exposes our no longer clear notion as to what,
precisely, matter might mean.
Even the notion of matter as employed by St. Thomas is not
without difficulties. For him, following Aristotle, matter is
the principle of individuation. Indeed, it is because Aquinas
holds that angels are pure spirits, and immaterial, that the
road is open to argue that each angel constitutes a separate
species unto itself; which accords well, of course, with the
notion of the Great Chain of Being. However, in a postMarxian, post-Hegelian world one would expect to hear that
the principle of human individuation is society rather than
matter. And if the principle of individuation is, indeed,
"matter," then in a post-Mendelian age I suppose what we
would really mean is that it is genetics.
These are some of the reason.s: why angels have fallen, philosophically as well as theologically, on hard times. The difficulty is evident, for example, in a statement made by Heidegger
in his What is Metaphysics? : " An angel is; it does not exist." 12
Indeed, no one would wish to argue that an angel is a Beingin-the-W orld, whose existence is characterized by care, as a
Being-unto-Death, or whatever set of existentialia one might
11
12

An Essay Concerning Human Underli'tanding,III, 6, 11-12; IV, 16,12.
Was ist Metaphysik? (7ed.; Frankfurt a/M.: Klostermann, 1955), pp. 15-16.

GEORGE J. SEIDEL, O.S.B.

445

wish to advance. Neither would one care to argue that the
being of the angel and its horizon of understanding is characterized by temporality; or that it is marked by the " transcendence" of Dasein's" standing-out-from-its-standing-in-theopenness-of-being." 13 Nonetheless, if one were to take the bottom line of the meaning of existence in Heidegger, especially as
it is rooted in the thought of Kierkegaard, namely " to choose,"
what could he a more thoroughgoing example of the truth of
existence (which is freedom), of disclosedness (Erschlossenheit)
than the angel looking upon the face of God, or of the resoluteness
(Entschlossenheit) of the bad angel declaring" Non serviam!"?
Angelic choice would appear to be the ultimate in authenticity
or inauthenticity, the quintessential example of becoming, or
refusing to become, what one is.14
So much for the status quaestionis regarding angels. So far as
theologians demythologizing angels and demons back to their
roots in Persian or Iranian myths are concerned, these intellectual exercises I leave to the theologians. Perhaps, theologians
do not need angels. I am convinced, however, that philosophers
do, if only as a speculative test case for the meaning of the
human person. 14 "
This is certainly one of the functions that angels perform
in St. Thomas's scheme of things. Angelic knowing provides
a point of comparison with human knowing (a) in the state
of innocence, as unaffected by concupiscible and irascible
appetites, 15 (b) in the present state of life-the angelic intellect
knows intelligible substance separated from the corporeal, whereas the human intellect knows the quiddity or nature of things
Sein und Zeit, p. 364.
"SZ, pp. 297, 307. Compare St. Thoma.s's usage of the term obstinatio in describing the entitative "fixing" of the angel's condition in a single choice. ST
I, 64, Q. In good angels after one meritorious act. ST I, 6Q, 5.
14 • Or as James Collins puts it, "A knowledge of angelic powers and operations
provides a stable standard for evaluating their human counterparts and for
indicating the proper direction in which these capacities should be orientated."
The Thomistic Philosophy of Ange/,s (Washington D.C.: Catholic University of
America Press, 1947) , p. 371.
1 " ST I, 94, 2, c.
18

446

THE SIN OF ANGELICISM

REVISITED

existing in corporeal matter 16- ( c) the knowing of the disembodied soul,11 as also (d) the equality of angelic and human
knowing in heaven (in patria) · through the Word, that is,
through the divine essence, in one simultaneous vision. 18 In all
this, angelic knowledge provides Aquinas with a means of
underscoring the fundamental importance of the imagination
and its phantasms.
(Note the constantly recurring phrase:
semper se convertere ad phantasmata) .
Angels, if not angelic knowledge, play a similarly important
role in the philosophy of John Locke, demonstrating equally the
fundamentally finite character of human understanding: " The
Candle that is set up in us shines bright enough for all our
purposes." 19 For Locke argues that our knowledge of corporeal substance (as an "I know not what") is better than
our knowledge of immaterial substance. 20
Ever since Feuerbach we are more than ever aware of the
difficulty of defining something as odd as human being. In his
Essence of Christianity (1841), for example, Feuerbach attempted to define human being in terms of that which was
wholly other than man, namely God; he discovered, however,
that God was defined in terms of the human person (" Theology
Later in the Essence of Religion (1851)
is anthropology").
he tried defining human reality in terms of that upon which it
is most dependent, namely nature, with attendant difficulties
I have gone into elsewhere. 21
Perhaps, the most influential philosophical anthropology in
this century, if not intended as such, is that of Heidegger, who
attempts to define Dasein in relation to being, while admitting,
at the start, that being is fundamentally indefinable. 22 It is,
however, questionable to define the meaning of Dasein in terms
of being as temporality, when the meaning of being as temporST I, 84, 7, c.
ST I, 89, 3.
1 • ST I, 58, 2, c.
1'

11

Cf. Essay, Intro., 5.
Essay, II, 23, 5, 36-37.
21 Cf. my "Feuerbach's
Anti-Humanism,"
(1975) 454-463.
22 SZ, p. 3.
1•

20

American Benedictine Review, 26

GEORGE J. SEIDEL, O.S.B.

447

ality is derived from the meaning of Dasein. This is more
than merely a hermeneutical circle; it is a vicious one.
Experimental psychology has generally attempted to throw
light upon human behavior by means of objective observational
and experimental data from animal behavior. The difficulty
is contained, as we have been made more aware by phenomenology, in that word " data." Such so-called objective data
has first to be given subjectively to a free personal consciousness.
The perils of personification are built in. Further, we are becoming more and more aware of the influence which the human
experimenter and humanly constructed scientific instruments
have upon the "personality" of the experimental animal.
Even upon plants!
But if there is a danger of personification in dealing with
animal behavior, of ascribing human personal modes of behavior
to animals, there is no less of a danger of an " angelification " of
human knowing and human freedom on the part of philosophers
who do not thematically develop a theory of the angelic
person.
Maritain has already pointed out the " sin of angelicism,"
somewhat intemperately, in relation to Descartes, 23 a charge,
incidentally, which Descartes had to defend himself against in
his own lifetime. 24 Maritain accuses Descartes of ascribing
angelic modes of knowing to human ones: immediate intuition
into clear and distinct ideas-note St. Thomas's remark that
the angel's apprehension involves no movem:ent (immobiliter),
like that of a human being's apprehension of first principles 25 innate ideas, similar to the innate possession of intelligible
species in angels, 26 and knowledge independent of things. However, it strikes me that Maritain is guilty of the same "sin"
with his notion of the "intuition of being," 27 a co-natural knowledge not dissimilar to the connaturality between heavenly intel••Cf. Three Reformers (London: Sheed and Ward; 1947), pp. 53 ff.
••Cf. Letter to Beeckman, 17. X. 1680 in Descartes: Phlilosoprhical,utters (A.
Kenny, tr., Oxford: Clarendon, 1970), p. 17.
••ST I, 64.
••CG II, 96.
27 Cf. his Preface to Metaphysics, Third Lecture
(New York: Sheed and Ward,
1937), pp. 48 ff.

448

THE SIN OF ANGl<JLICISM REVISITED

ligence and intelligible species in Aquinas. 28 It would appear
that even in a philosopher witli ·a theory of angels, if a borrowed
one, there is a danger of falling into the sin of angelicism.
Perhaps, the most influential philosophical anthropology of
the nineteenth century is that o.f Fichte, who attempted to
define human reality essentially in terms of human freedom. 29
The attempt was admittedly self-defeating, since to define
freedom is to systematize it, that is, reduce it to necessity, in
which case, of course, it is no longer freedom. But no matter.
Fichte's is such a total theory of freedom, or better, a theory
of total freedom, that even the so-called passivity of sensation
is a case of the free activity of freely allowing myself to be
passive relative to sensation (a non-positing positing) : the fly
cannot annoy me; I freely allow myself to be annoyed by the
fly.30 In other words, if independence of reality is characteristic
of angelic knowledge, as Maritain maintains, then surely the
totally free consciousness of Fichte is a case in point.
It surely seems to be the case with the absolute freedom of
J.-P. Sartre. "Freedom," says Sartre, "is total and infinite ... "
And the only limits that freedom encounters are those that it
has imposed upon itself .31 Indeed, according to Sartre, " .. .in
a certain sense I choose being born ... assuming this birth in full
responsibility and making it mine." 32 There is, I think, a
parallel between Sartre's choice of" facticity" and Aquinas's or
Hegel's Lucifer choosing its "natural existence."
One hesitates to enter the tortuous paths of Schelling's
thought in search of the angeliffcation of human knowing; but
it is easily observable in his early philosophy of identity in
which he revives the notion of intellectual intuition as an
immediate knowing of the Absolute, the identity of subject and
object, and in and through it, borrowing from Spinoza's notion
of the ms intuitiva, a knowledge of the particular individual
2•

ST I, 58, 1, c.

29

Cf. my A()tivity and Ground: Ffohte, S()helling, and Hegel, (Hildesheim: Olms,

1976)' p. 12.
ao Ibid., pp. 52-56.
81 Being and Nothingness (H. Barnes, tr.), p. 5lH.
•• Ibid., p. 556.

GEORGE J. SEIDEL,

o.s.B.

449

thing in its intricate detail. 33 The implications of this position
for Schelling's philosophy of nature and his philosophy of art
prove significant. The similarity between it and St. Thomas's
position regarding the knowledge of the particular individual
thing through species imparted to it by God also proves significant. 34
As for a parallel with angelic knowledge in Hegel, one may
suppose that it might best be discovered in the viewpoint of the
fur unB, the " for us ", that is " us the philosophers " observing
the process whereby spirit comes to a self-conscious knowledge of
itself as spirit. However, as we the philosophers also know,
spirit must eventually " ... penetrate and digest this entire
wealth of its substance," not simply in terms of its forms. but
also in terms of its content. 35 Compare this with Aquinas's
view that " ... of necessity every separated substance knows
all natural things and the total order thereof." 36
In his work on the young Hegel Wilhelm Dilthey says of
the tradition that we have been considering, albeit in a cursory
manner:
Every philosophy that would take seriously the insight of
idealism has basically two choices: either a world without God
or a God without a world; we must either get rid of (aufheben)
ourselves or God.37

What I have been suggesting in the latter part of this paper is
that if this philosophical tradition had developed a theory of
angels, perhaps the options would not have been so extreme;
man is not even an angel, let alone God. For this reason, I
would argue that if angelic persons did not exist, philosophers
would be obliged to invent them.
GEORGE

J. SEIDEL, O.S.B.

St. Martin's College
Olympia, Washington
••Activity and Ground, esp., pp. 94-99.
••ST I, 57, 2, c. As also De Veritate VIII, 11.
••Phenomenology of Spirit (Miller, tr.), pp. 492-493, as also pp. 479-480.
••CG II, 99.
•• Gesammelte Schriften, IV, 268.

BOOK REVIEWS
Life and Death With Liberty and Justice. By GERMAIN G. GmsEz and
JosEPH M. BOYLE, JR. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame
Press, 1979. Pp. 519.
Many state legislatures in the past dcade have either passed or are presently considering the passage of bills permitting " death with dignity "
and voluntary or nonvoluntary euthanasia. In general, these bills would
either permit a person to choose his own death when his quality of life
had become unacceptable or would allow one to bring death upon another
whose life was deemed to be unacceptable or of poor quality. Classical
prohibitions of death with dignity, voluntary or involuntary euthanasia,
and suicide have been based on the sanctity of life principle. This principle
sees the life of the human being as sacred, and prohibits any direct lethal
attack on the human life of the person. It no longer enjoys the wide
acceptance it once had, and the void created by its collapse has caused
acute problems in ethics and jurisprudence. Grisez and Boyle attempt to
fill this void and argue that the widely accep'ted jurisprudential principles
of justice and liberty prohibit the legalization of voluntary and nonvoluntary euthanasia.
First and foremost, this is a work of jurisprudence,
for its primary concern is with showing that laws prohibiting voluntary
and nonvoluntary euthanasia do not violate justice and liberty. But this
is also an ethical work, for the authors elaborate a theory of ethics and
discuss the ethical aspects of many problems related to the euthanasia
debate. It is a thorough, subtle, detailed and wide ranging discussion of
legal aspects of death, suicide, mercy killing, euthanasia, abortion and
of justified killing, ethical theory and the relation of law and morality.
The chapter discussing the definition of death provides a clear and
accurate definition of death and the moment at which death occurs. While
the critique of some of the newer definitions of death are informative, the
discussion as a whole appears to lack rigor and clear foundation. Death
is defined as the "turning point" at which respiration, heartbeat, and
the functions continuously present throughout life give way to decomposition. A fuller discussion of the nature of the human person and the
relation of the human person to this " turning point " would have aided
the contemporary debates. Operationally, death is defined as the complete and irreversible loss of function of the whole brain, a definition
which appears to be gaining wider acceptance.
Discussing the right of competent patients to refuse medical treatment,

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451

Grisez and Boyle hold that it is always lawful for competent patients to
decline treatment. The lawfulness of this is protected by the jurisprudential principle of liberty, and not that of privacy. The authors argue
that decisions to refuse treatment should not be based on quality of life
arguments or on the premise that some lives are not worth living. Rather,
they argue that treatments may be refused when a person is dying and
when further treatments would be useless. This account is not fully
adequate, for it does not pay sufficient attention to the treatments themselves. A more proper account would hold that competent patients would
be able to refuse those treatments that cause grave burdens themselves
for the patient, cause these burdens for those responsible for the patient,
or which have grave burdens associated with the treatments themselves.
This account would make it lawful for the competent nondying patient
to refuse treatments that required heroic or conspicuously virtuous acts
on the part of the patient, which the account offered by the authors
would not necessarily permit.
In the chapter dealing with suicide and liberty, the authors argue that
attempts at suicide should not be subjected to criminal punishment. This
should be the case for the reason that suicide, considered in and of itself,
does not constitute an offense against liberty or justice. Attempts at
suicide do not bring unwarranted harm to others, and such attempts do
not impinge upon other persons' rightful claims to liberty.
In the discussion of voluntary euthanasia, Grisez and Boyle object
that the practice of assisting others in their suicide is a violation of
liberty, and should not be made lawful. This is a violation of liberty for
the reason that each and every citizen has the right to remain aloof from
acts considered to be immoral which serve no notable state interest. The
legalization of assisted suicide would require governmental regulation and
control so that euthanasia would never be inflicted on anyone who did not
choose it voluntarily. The tax support that this regulation would require
would involve objecting citizens against their will, and this would be a
violation of their liberty. Self-inflicted lethal harm not requiring the
assistance of another would not require this form of regulation, and
would not be an infringement on the liberty of those who choose to remain
aloof. From the moral standpoint, the authors argue that voluntary
euthanasia is never to be considered as a morally good choice because it
is a direct turning against the good of human life, and that there is
never a sufficient proportionate reason for directly terminating one's life.
This and other chapters provide a comprehensive overview of existing bills
permitting voluntary or nonvoluntary euthanasia and death with dignity.
And in very well formulated arguments they present alternative model
bills. These bills would not only fully protect liberty and justice, but
would also reject the legalization of voluntary and nonvoluntary euthanasia.

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And in defending these model bills, the authors rightly point out that
many proponents of voluntary euthanasia cite examples of nonvoluntary
euthanasia in defense of their principles, and this leads one to believe that
their ultimate goal is not just the legalization of voluntary euthanasia, but
the legalization of nonvoluntary euthanasia as well.
Nonvoluntary euthanasia is regarded by the authors as a species of
murder that should not be granted legal permissibility. Nonvoluntary
euthanasia violates justice in two ways, for it deprives victims of the
good of human life to which the victim has an absolute claim. It is also
a violation of justice because the standards employed to determine who
should be the victim of nonvoluntary euthanasia are arbitrary, subjective,
impressionistic, and hence, unjust. Criteria such as lack of personhood,
lack of sufficient intelligence, poor quality of life, extraordinary pain and
others are subjectively determined, ambiguous, and unjust. Their ambiguity means that some will suffer nonvoluntary euthanasia who should not.
Nonvoluntary euthanasia, like voluntary euthanasia, violates liberty in
that it requires regulation which would impinge upon the liberty of those
who would wish to remain aloof from a practice that serves no evident
state interest. Nonvoluntary euthanasia is regarded by the authors as being
more dangerous than voluntary euthanasia because of the arbitrariness of
the criteria employed to determine who should be subjected to it. These
criteria also have a natural tendency to expand. Fletcher's criteria
of personhood, for example, as a Stanford-Binet I.Q. of 40, would permit
all with I.Q.s below that to be subjected to mercy killing. There is
little observable difference between an individual with an I.Q. of 40 and
one with 45, and hence there is a natural pressure also to subject those
with I.Q.s of 45 to nonvoluntary euthanasia.
The authors also object that Marvin Kohl's contention that nonvoluntary euthanisia imposed on the retarded, defective, insane, gravely ill,
and comatose is a species of kindness or an act of beneficence. Acts
of this type cannot be considered beneficent for the reason that they are a
direct turning against human goods and because they deprive the
victims of human goods that are properly due to them as persons. Only
an invalid casuistry could hold that visiting death upon another is a
form of kindness or beneficence. Because death is not a good that perfects
the rational nature of man, Grisez and Boyle discount Daniel Maguire's
notion that any form of euthanasia could be an object worthy of human
choice. And Richard McCormick's proposal for excluding from the protection of the law of murder those who lack relational potential is
criticized
others have used this principle to justify nonvoluntary
euthanasia. Because this criterion is so elastic, subjective, and arbitrary,
it is necessary to reject it as unjust.
The difficult problem of determining when to withhold treatments from

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458

noncompetent persons is given separate treatment by the authors. They
argue that treatment should only be withheld from noncompetent persons
who are in the dying process, and not from those who are not dying
and noncompetent. That they would be better off dead and that their
lives are of poor quality are unacceptable reasons for refusing treatment
to the incompetent.
The only valid grounds for this action is that
the treatment is useless for the dying person and that the rational
competent would probably refuse the treatments if he were to suffer a
similar fate. This standard adequately protects the liberty of the noncompetent person to refuse treatment while also protecting the nondying
person's right to life-saving and life-prolonging treatments.
The case of
Karen Quinlan was judged according to the proper principles, in the
opinion of the authors, even though the court was not as thorough as it
might have been in determining whether Miss Quinlan actually was dying.
And the case of Joseph Saikewicz, who was a severely retarded, institutionalized sixty-seven year old man in the terminal stages of myeloblastic
monocetic leukemia, was also judged according to the proper principles.
The court accepted the opinion of the appointed guardian that continued
treatment would not be in the patient's best interests because of its
uselessness and because a rational competent patient would also probably
refuse the treatments.
Quality of life arguments were clearly rejected
in both of these cases, with the authors' approval.
As was said previously, this book is not only a work of jurisprudence
but also one of ethics. And in keeping with this, Grisez and Boyle develop
a coherent and powerful theory of ethics and human action. Utilitarianism,
subjectivism, relativism, and consequentialism are all rejected, and in their
place a natural law theory of ethics and foundation of jurisprudence is set
forth. Acts are morally good when they are done in behalf of naturally
known human goods which are the objects of natural human inclinations.
These goods are such things as life, knowledge, integrity, genuineness,
activities and experiences for their own sake, and truth. Acts are morally
evil when they turn against these goods and when they prohibit the
realization of these goods. Moral agents have the positive duty always to
refrain from turning against these goods. But they are not obliged always
and everywhere to act in behalf of all human goods. Of special interest is
the distinction made between death-dealing performances and acts of
killing. In death-dealing performances such as justified killing, the death
of a person is an effect of an act, even though the death was not part of
the proposal of the agent. A death-dealing performance is not morally
culpable, even though these performances may appear to be homicidal.
A very clear, thorough and orderly presentation of the duties and
responsibilities to human life of citizens, health care professionals, service
personnel, and institutions is provided in this work. Participation in

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suicide, nonvoluntary euthanasia, and abortion in any direct manner are
rejected by the authors. It is the chapter on these matters which gives
the work its appeal to a wide audience. The authors strongly suggest that
special care and attention be given to the psychological, familial, emotional,
and medical needs of the dying patient. If this were to be done on a
broader scale, it is quite possible that the outcry for the legalization of
voluntary and nonvoluntary euthanasia would be diminished. This might
come about because much of the criticism stems from the apparent lack of
compassionate care and attention given the dying in many health care
institutions.
While supporting the cause of the human life amendment, Grisez and
Boyle argue that it ought to be formulated so as to gain wider support.
This means that it should not only protect the life of the unborn, but also
that of the insane, dying, deformed, senile, incompetent, and comatose,
while also guaranteeing the exercise of liberty and justice.
The concluding chapter establishes the proper relation between ethics
and jurisprudence, and rejects subjectivist, utilitarian, and consequentialist
foundations for jurisprudence. Law is not to be merely a mechanical
extension of ethics, but is to be an articulation of the principles of
justice and liberty accepted by the American proposition. It is the duty
of ethics to explicate the content of these principles, but not to determine
what is lawful.
Life and Death With Liberty and Justice is a long and difficult book
to read. A cursory reading may lead the reader to believe that the work
suffers from repetition. But a closer reading would reveal it to be a work
which approaches many complex issues from a variety of vantage points.
An expensive book, it is also well organized and attractively bound. The
table of contents and the index permit easy location of significant topics.
The style is forceful and nontechnical. Unfortunately, the notes are at the
end of the text rather than on the bottom of the page or at the end of
chapters. The notes are quite informative and worthy of close attention.
Given the cost of the book, the significance it will have in the euthanasia
debate, and its widespread appeal, it is to be hoped that a paperback
edition will appear.
It is unfortunate the authors do not analyze the principle of the sanctity
of human life more closely, for this concept is becoming increasingly
important in ethical and jurisprudential debates. If there is any weakness
in the work, it is in the discussion of assisted voluntary euthanasia. To
assist the suicide of another, as in the case of Lester Zygmaniak, is not to
inflict injustice on the victim but is to assist the person in the lawful exercise
of the person's liberty. While regulation of this practice may infringe
upon the liberty of others, proponents of voluntary assisted euthanasia
would argue that the service this provides to the exercise of the liberty

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of others warrants overriding the claims of those who wish to remain aloof.
Critics may also charge that the authors are somewhat optimistic in their
account of how human goods and natural inclinations are known.
This work is extremely valuable because of the intelligent, coherent,
The euthanasia debate will
and convincing arguments it contains.
intensify in coming years, and its resolution will only come about through
intelligent and sober debate. Life and Death With Liberty and Justice
must be viewed as not just another contribution to the euthanasia debate
but as a very important study.
ROBERT

L. BARRY, 0. P.

Dominican House of Studies
Washington, DC.

St. Thomas Aquinas. By RALPH MclNERNY. Boston: Twayne Publishers (A
Division of G. K. Hall & Co.), 1977. Pp. 197. $8.95.
Profesor Mclnerny begins his preface with the following words: "In this
book, I have aspired to write an introduction to the thought of a man who
for some seven hundred years has been a major influence in philosophy and
theology" (p. 9). It is indeed an introduction, a remarkably written and
eminently readable one, one which can be readily understood by the
intelligent reader who has never read a single word of St. Thomas Aquinas.
But it is far more than an introduction; it presents the thought of
Aquinas with precision and care, and adorns it with insights which will
doubtless delight, and enlighten, even the seasoned reader of Aquinas.
The organization of the book is in a way natural, and yet uncommon.
Having presented a short, but very effective--at points even movingaccount of the life and work of St. Thomas with an account of his ancestry
as background (pp. ll-Q9), Mclnerny writes a chapter on what Aquinas
made of Aristotle (pp. 30-74) , another on what he made of Boethius (pp.
75-104), a third on what he made of Platonism (pp. 105-rn6), and a
fourth on what Aquinas takes theology and its tasks to be (pp. rn7-169).
The idea behind this organization was to " enable the reader to appreciate
both Thomas's continuity with earlier thought and his creative independence of it" (p. 9). In the last chapter (pp. 170-1 n), entitled Envoi,
Mclnerny gives his book and Aquinas a royal bon voyage, ending, as he
began, with the thought that this book " tried to present Thomas in such
a way that my reader would quickly leave me and go to the works of
Aquinas himself" (p. 9) "Ite ad Thomam. Go to Thomas. That is
the message of this book " (p. l 7Q) . The Notes and References, pp. l 7318Q, are extremely helpful. The Selected Bibliography, pp. 183-189, gathers
together primary sources in Latin, primary sources in English translation,

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and a fine collection of secondary sources, each accompanied by short but
clear and informative account of its contents. The careful and exhaustive
entries of the Index, pp. 191-197, bring the book to a close, and re-impress
on the reader's mind another message of this book: sapientis est ordinare.
Aristotle. In reflecting on what Aquinas made of Aristotle, Mcinerny
concentrates on Aquinas's treatment of Aristotle's apparent claims, contrary to Christian belief, that 1) the world is eternal,
there is no personal immortality, and 3) God, as thought thinking itself, is not concerned
with the world, that there is no such thing as divine providence.
Boethius. In his thoughts on what Aquinas made of Boethius, Mclnerny's
primary concerns are with 1) how the notion of separatio is introduced into
the discussion of the relation of metaphysics to the other speculative
sciences, 2) the distinction between essence and existence, as an interpretation of Boethius's axiom that diversum est esse et id quad est, and 3)
the compatibility between divine foreknowledge and human freedom.
Platonism,. In discussing what Aquinas made of Platonism, Mcinerny
concentrates on 1) the cognitive (theory of knowledge: illumination and
abstraction) and the ontological (problem of universals) role of the
Ideas, and 2) on the distinction between essential and participated perfection, with special reference to the names of God.
The taslcs of theology. In considering Aquinas's views on theology and
its tasks, Mcinerny 1) begins by asking whether ontology (the science of
all things, of whatever is) or theology (the science of what exists apart
from matter and motion) is the correct way of characterizing metaphysics;
then 2) explains that analogous terms, i. e., terms with a controlled
variety of meanings, both make it possible that there be a determinate
philosophical science of being as being, and account for the meaningfulness
of terms as they are extended from creatures to God; 3) reflects on the
distinction between philosophical theology and revealed theology, i. e.,
theology based on Holy Scripture; 4) makes clear the nature of religious
faith, as opposed to knowing, opining, doubting, and simply believing; 5)
discusses the notion of preambles of faith, and shows how these differ from
the mysteries of faith; 6) shows the relevance of philosophical proofs for
God's existence to the case for the reasonableness of believing all that God
has revealed; 7) examines, by way of instructive examples, the third of the
Five Ways; 8) concludes by noting that the tasks of revealed theology,
basically three in number, coincide with its uses of philosophy: a) to
use philosophy to prove the preambles of faith, b) to use philosophy to
cast light upon the mysteries of faith, and c) to use philosophy for the
refutation of objections brought against the mysteries of faith.
An example of Mclnerny's delightful and enlightening insights. This
brief review would be incomplete, perhaps even remiss, without some words,
however few, on Mclnerny's interpretation of the first stage of the Third

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457

Way recorded by Aquinas, i. e., the stage in which the argument moves
from the observed existence of possibles to the concluded existence of something necessary, a stage which has puzzled so many so often, troubled,
bewildered, frustrated, drawn charges of logical muddle, even put unsaid
words and unthought thoughts into the mouth and mind of Aquinas.
How is it possible to move from a) the assum,ption that everything which
exists came into existence and so did not exist some prior time, to b)
the claim that therefore there was some prior time when nothing a,t all
existed? As Mcinery puts it, "there seems no need to have one
particular time at which no such thing exists simply because, for each
of them, there is a prior time when it did not exist " (p. 165) . Mclnerny
feels there must be some way of interpreting this move of Aquinas
which will bring out its legitirnate and compelling point, some way to
unpuzzle, untrouble, unbewilder. The question to be asked, Mclnerny
suggests, is this one: Why should there be anything like that at all (i. e.,
like things which came into being) ? One must pass from a consideration
of this or that individual thing which has come into being to a consideration
of that sort or kind of thing .
. . . what Thomas is saying is that not everything which is could be that sort of
thing .... Granted the existence of such things, each of which is such that before
it was it was not, there is of course no need that each member of the class
not be simultaneously. But. .. , if we ask why there should be things like that at
all, the answer that would explain one of them by appeal to an-0ther simply
begs the question .... What the first stage of his pro-0f seeks to establish is that
in order for there to be things of 'this kind [my italics], things that can be,
there must be things of another kind [my italics], things that must be. (p·. 166).

This kind cannot be without that kind-a simple, royal, elegant, compelling move.
Delightful and enlightening, but humble. Among Mclnerny's thoughts,
as he brings his book to an end, is the comment that, looking back over
what he has written in it, he is dismayed at how little he has managed
to say, at how much he has left unsaid; which leads him to remark that
he is "Thomist enough to think that it is straw" (p. 170). The truth is, I
am led to remark, that, if little has been said, it is an inexhaustible httle;
and that, if it is straw, it is high quality straw indeed.

J osEPH BoBIK
University of Notre Dame
Notre Dame, Indiana

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The Reflection of Theology in Literature: A Case Study in Theology.
Trinity University Monograph Series in Religion IV. By WILLIAM
MALLARD. San Antonio: Trinity University Press, 1977. Pp. xi

+
In a recent review essay surveying thirteen books dealing with theology
and literature in Religious Studies Review (April, 1978) Profesor Robert
Detweiler concluded that the diverse works under consideration (on topics
as diverse as structural exegesis and the novels of Flannery O'Connor) had
certain things in common: the distinction between theologians and literary
critics seems to be blurring a bit; there is in all of the books a sustained
interest in questions of method and theory; " a new emphasis on metaphor
and parable is present, especially an emphasis that sees parable as an
unique kind of metaphor particularly apt for religion and literature dis-course " (p. 116); and there is a sustained interest in the function of the
imagination. These general characteristics, mutatis mutandis, would make
a perfectly adequate, if somewhat superficial, description of the main con·
tours of the arguments in this dense and closely argued work.
More specifically, Professor Mallard has set himself the rather formidable
task of showing how theology in the West has been reflected in Western
literature.
This reflection is not always an easy thing to spot, and
Mallard recognizes that theology was much more clearly refracted in
the literature of Dante or Milton's time. The test case comes, of course
in an age such as ours when the culture professes to be in rebellion against
or indifferent to, any theological or faith suppositions. Mallard is also
confident that any apologetical approach, even such a sophisticated one as
Tillich's justly celebrated method of correlation, is only of limited value.
Apologetical approaches to literature (especially in hands less sophisticated
than Tillich's) tend "to serve certain prescribed theological ends and its
(i. e. literature's) variety is held captive to a single meaning" (p. 19) .
Likewise, Mallard thinks that studies in metaphor and parable (cf. the
work of Perrin, Via, Funk, TeSelle, Crossan, et al.) have not yet set the
outer limits on the relationship of theology and literature.
Mallard, then, while appreciative of the work of others in the field
of theology and literature, sets out on a slightly different tack. The central
thesis of his study is that the surest approach to theology in literature lies
with certain formal, generalized traits of the literary work which recall
the theological roots of Western culture generally" (p. 110). More
specifically, and this is the burden of the central argument of the book,
much of Western literature and art reflects or " images " certain basic
ideas rooted in the accounts of the major events in the life of Jesus. These

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459

ideas are " proper " in theology and " reflected " in literature. Thus, to
cite one example, the recurring image of crisis and recovery in literature
may reflect the theological idea of death/resurrection in the proper theology
that springs from the Jesus story. It should be obvious that this approach
is indebted to, and openly dependent upon, the pioneering literary work of
Erich Auerbach.
In order to sustain this thesis in a rigorous fashion, Mallard found it
necessary to deal in depth with language, metaphor, and criticism in an
introductory section. This opening part of the book covers a lot of ground,
with a heavy emphasis on the Heideggerian notion of the revelatory nature
of language itself. Those readers unfamiliar with current literary theory
and criticism will receive, in this first part of the book, a short course on
first and second level discourse, metaphor, symbol, narrative theory, and
criticism. The second part of the work deals with the reflected theology
in literature by emphasizing the positive role that knowledge of the
world and the things of the world has played in Western theology together
with the principles that can be deduced therefrom. In this section Mallard
uses Kafka's The Trial and William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury
as test cases for this reflected theology in literature. Since Western theology
begins, not with propositions, but stories, it is only proper that part three
of the work should pay particular attention to the Gospel narratives of
Jesus as an example of "proper" theology.
In the final reflection of part three (" The Theological Reading of
Literature'', pp. 252-62) Mallard admits that the theology that is reflected
in literature is " finally an ambiguous theology " but despite such a lack of
clarity, "we must draw the surprising, if not disturbing, conclusion that
all Western literature of aesthetic merit belongs finally within the sphere
of Christ " (p. 252) . Within the parameters of this sphere there are those
writers whose relation to the Christian worldview is without ambiguity
(Eliot, Auden, Bernanos, O'Connor, et al.), and those "opponents" of such
a worldview whose concerns are still deeply dependent on the preoccupations of Western theology (Sartre, Comus, O'Neill, Stevens, et. al.).
Exceptions to this schema-those who represent, in Mallard's terms, an
aesthetic failure because the author in question " has deserted the task of
imaginatively penetrating the stubborn materials of experience in favor of
certain fancies (p. 254)-are (Mallard cites Vonnegut as an example)
positive or confessional gnostics.
The exceptions to this " sphe1·e of Christ " are given short shrift in
Mallard's book, but one must agree with Sallie TeSelle's comment (Journal
of the American Academy of Religion, June, 1978, p. 251) that he has
ignored the " really tough customers " whose relationship to the Christian
sphere is problematic at the very least. TeSelle mentions the works of
writers like Thomas Pynchon, Doris Lessing, Vladamir Nabokov, and others

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of their quality. Her point is well taken, and the customers get even
tougher when one begins to read some of the high quality fiction that
appears in such places as the TriQuarterly. In fact, in the same issue of the
J AAR in which TeSelle reviews the Mallard volume, David Hesla (" Reargues that the
ligion and Literature: The Second Stage," pp.
area of theology and literature (" the first stage ") is increasingly shifting
to a " second stage ", that of religion and literature. One characteristic of
that shift, Hesla writes, will be a move " from the language of theology to
the language of religion " and, in that shift, " We shall increasingly find
ourselves using the language of the behavioral and social sciences, of the
sociologies of religion and knowledge, of anthropology and psychology, of
history and political theory" (p. 190).
Hesla's prophecy may or may not be true, but it does reflect a serious
concern to chart the course that the field of interdisciplinary studies must
take as it confronts the phenomenon of the " post-modern " in literary art.
In that sense, I suspect, Hesla would not be about to admit that tbe
literature of the future must stay exclusively within the sphere of Christ
in order to avoid being aesthetically deficient. The " Postmodern " does
present one way in which the art of our culture may be moving, and it is a
direction that Mallard does not take seriously enough.
The criticism above is not intended to make light of the considerable
merit of this work. It is, in fact, a very sophisticated and tightly argued
work that reflects the highest standards of care and seriousness. To
borrow again a term from Hesla (Mallard's colleague at Emory}, Mallard
sets out a full agenda for a " first phase " reflection on theology and
literature and completes the agenda with distinction. It just occurs to
me that we may now be entering a period in our culture when new
approaches are needed.
LAWRENCE s. CUNNINGHAM
The Florida State University
Tallahassee, Florida

A namnesis. By Emc V OEGELIN. Translated

and edited by Gerhart Niemeyer. Notre Dame and London: University of Notre Dame Press,
$11.95.
Press, 1978. Pp. xxii +

I
Eric Voegelin, born in Germany and raised in Austria, came to the
United States in 1938 as a political emigre. For American readers this
event proved fortuitous indeed, since most of Voegelin's major works,

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461

including the seminal New Science of Politics and the multi-volume Order
in History, were thus written in English. One principal exception to this
collection of English writings was Anamnesis, a book published in 1966 while
Voegelin was Director of the Institute for Political Science at the University
of Munich. However, with Gerhart Niemeyer's recent translation, Anamnesis, too, joins the corpus of V oegelin books available to the English reading
public.
It should be noted, however, that the English version of Anamnesis differs
substantially from the German original. Several chapters have been
deleted, either because they have since been published elsewhere or
because they deal mainly with the analysis of historical material, and
two chapters have been added, one written by Voegelin especially for
the English edition. Niemeyer explains that the principle of selection
was the theme of Voegelin's philosophy of consciousness. Anamnesis is a
book about philosophy. To be sure it is a difficult book, perhaps Voegelin's
most difficult; nevertheless, it offers a suitable starting-place since it
contains all the essentials of Voegelin's provocative conception of philosophy.

II
For Voegelin the central philosophical question is order: order as it is
experienced in personal life; order in society, or political philosophy proper;
and order in history. To say that order is a question is somewhat misleading, however, because Voegelin as a philosopher does not entertain
the possibility that the world is disordered, that it is at bottom a chaos
rather than a cosmos. The dilemma which faced Nietzsche and which
Nietzsche predicted would overwhelm Western philosophy, namely that
the consoling illusion of an intelligible world order would be shattered by
the truth of nihilism-this dilemma does not arise, cannot arise. Philosophy,
Voegelin emphatically and repeatedly insists, is not a proof for the existence
of God, for a Prime Mover, for Spirit, or for Natural Right. Such a proof
is not necessary, and when offered merely occasions counter-claims. It is
not necessary because philosophy is, or originates in, the experience of order.
Voegelin gives stress to the existential beginnings of philosophy. The experience of order confirms the existence of order, or of what Voegelin
frequently calls the divine ground of being. He cites the " joyful " tone of
classic philosophy: "the tonality of being scaned or frightened by a
question to which no answer can be found is characteristically absent from
the classic experience" (101). Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle disengaged
from the moorings of traditional belief and sailed an unknown sea of philosophical inquiry without any discernible anxiety lest what awaited them
was an abyss of nothingness. Voegelin attributes this hopefulness to the
originating experience of order which both caused and directed their
journey-an argument which may help to explain why courage is so lightly

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regarded by the classic philosophers, whereas for Nietzsche it is a virtue
of singular importance.
In a chapter entitled " Reason: The Classic Experience," Voegelin
elaborates on the experiential character of philosophy. Typical of Voegelin
here is the employment of a difficult and unfamiliar vocabulary, the terms
of which are very often transliterations of the Greek, sometimes even
neologisms. Of central importance are the words nous and noesis. The
simple dictionary meaning of nous is " mind," and of noesis " thought " or
" intellection," the activity of mind. But in the language of Greek philosophers, those as early as Parmenides and Anaxagoras, nous represented
either man's faculty to apperceive being (Parmenides) or the intelligible
structure of being itself (Anaxagoras). With Aristotle especially the two
conceptions merged, and nous came to designate the driving cause (aition}
as well as the soul's correspondence to the divine. Consulting Aristotle's
Metaphysics, Voegelin produces a definition of the noetic soul as the
"sensorium of the divine aition."
Reality, says Voegelin, lies in the soul's experience of order. But the
experience requires that the soul be open to the divine. This opening is
accomplished in several stages, and its analysis calls forth a whole new set
of terms drawn equally from the vocabularies of Plato and Aristotle. The
soul exists in a state of unrest. It knows not its origin or its destiny, and
it wonders (thaumazein).
It feels itself moved to ask questions, drawn
(helkein) into a search for the cause of its being. Sometimes it is forcefully turned around (periagage) from ignorance (agnoia) and complacency
and inspired to pursue knowledge (episteme). In all, the steps seem fourffold: 1) movement from above; 2) desire to know; 3) questioning in confusion; and '1) consciousness of ignorance.
In order to distinguish philosophy from religion, Voegelin requires of
the former that its response to the divine be articulated in language
symbols (often philosophical myths) which make plain the noetic
structure of the soul. Hence the content of philosophy is the soul's
tension toward the divine, a relationship which by its nature of flux and
uncertainty can only be symbolized and never made fixed in propositions.
What Voegelin more precisely means by philosophy is clarified by his
It is
discussion of the metaxy, a Platonic term meaning "in-between".
learned from the Symposium that man the philosopher abides in a
spiritual domain between godly wisdom and beast-like obtuseness. This
spiritual man (daimonios aner) excels all others by virtue of knowing of his
ignorance, but is deficient in wisdom and thus inferior to the gods. He is
erotic, for he desires wisdom and seeks immortality therein (to quote Aristotle, he immortalizes himself by nourishing his immortal part, his noits);
but like other men he is simultaneously distracted by the mortalizing pull
of the passions. Human life generally is caught betwixt what Plato in the

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Philebus calls the noetic height and the apeirontic depth. These are the
two poles of existence characterized respectively by intelligible oneness,
limitation, and immortality on the one hand, and limitlessness, generation,
and mortality on the other. These two poles reach into the human psyche,
structure it, and set its boundaries. The psyche in turn participates in the
reality of the poles, which reality, participatory or metaleptic in nature,
constitutes the only true domain of human thought. Says Voegelin: "To
move within the m.etaxy, exploring it in all directions and orienting himself
in the perspective granted to man by his position in reality, is the proper
task of the philosopher" (107). Philosophy, therefore, is confined to the
analysis of metaleptic relationships and falls short necessarily of full knowledge of the poles of existence. In other words, the Socratic quest for
wisdom culminates not in wisdom per se, but in consciousness of the divine
ground as its inspiration and desideratum. And even to speak of a culmination of the philosophical quest is likely misleading, for noetic consciousness advances by degrees, both in the individual and from one
individual to the next-a process which raises the question of the relationship between philosophy and history.
Voegelin is persist®t in his opposition to the customary understanding of
philosophy as a body of true propositions about being. Philosophy as metaphysics, he argues, arises from a narrow anwer given to the question, What
is nature? The common response is that nature is form imposed on matter,
that form is responsible for the unique separateness or essence of a thing.
But the more comprehensive answer, and the truly philosophical one, is that
nature is a composite of form and process, the latter of these two reflecting
the mythical perception of the world. Voegelin remarks that " the philosophic conception," best exemplified by the philosophy of Plato, " still
preserves the nature of being as a coming-to-be that was already given
in the primary [mythical] experience of the cosmos; while the metaphysical
concept accentuates the nature of things as a being ordered by form" (80).
That the two notions of nature fell into mutual tension Voegelin explains
by observing that the experience of being was originally an experience of God
and that God was experienced as a demi urge who farmed the world out of
shapeless matter. Voegelin cites Aristotle as the party responsible for this
"derailment."
But other arguments of Aristotle's earn him partial exoneration. In Metaphysics Alpha Aristotle maintains that the concepts of
infinite regress and infinite progress are untenable when applied to human
action. "Rationality," says Aristotle, " ... is incompatible with such an
infinite series; for the reasonable man always acts for the sake of something,
and this end serves as a limit" (994bl4-16).
Purposeful endeavor,
limited by an end which Voegelin, following Aristotle, identifies as the
divine nous, occasions an understanding of nature quite distinct from
that of form. Nature is less the form of being than it is the source and

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end of being, both located in the divine nous. Voegelin contends, " The
knowledge that being is not grounded in itself implies the question of
the origin, and in this question being is revealed as coming-to-be, albeit not
as a coming-to-be in the world of existing things but coming-to-be from the
ground of being" (86). This noetic experience, he concludes, transcends
the formal definition and the demiurgic images of nature.
Voegelin is thus confident that Aristotle, in spite of conflicting definitions
of nature, was not unfamiliar with nor unsympathetic to the problem of
noesis. But Voegelin is far less exculpatory when treating of Thomas
Aquinas, the man who introduced " metaphysics " into the vocabulary of
Western philosophy. Thomas defined "metaphysics" as the science of
first causes, universal principles, and immaterial substances-all immanent
things to be studied, known, and transmitted in the form of fixed and
dogmatic propositions. The predictable result was rebellion, undertaken
with fiery vehemence by the Enlightenment philosophes, who, as Voegelin
says, " had no trouble in throwing overboard the doubtful science of doubtful principles and substances " (194) . The further result was an " antimetaphysical taboo" which even today extends to all philosophy, including
predogmatic, noetic philosophy, about which little or nothing is known.
In sum, Voegelin charges Thomas with having neglected the noetic foundation of philosophy and with having constructed in its stead propositional
metaphysics; this dogmatic approach to philosophy first occasioned rival
dogmas and warfare among them (dogmatomachy) and finally provoked
ideological rebellion against the whole philosophical enterprise.
Voegelin is hardly disconsolate over the present state of philosophy.
Quite the contrary, he finds hopeful signs everywhere that after two
hundred years of ideological experimentation a new and revivified search
for order is under way. But this search will come to naught, he cautions,
unless it builds upon the noetic knowledge of the open soul in its tension
to the divine. Because the noetic state of the soul has been largely forgotten, buried beneath centuries of dogmatism, Voegelin advises recollection,
or what in Greek is called anamnesis-hence the title of his book.

III
A word of deserving praise. Eric Voegelin is a major thinker of the
twentieth century, and Anamnesis is telling evidence of his stature. Even
in its attenuated form, the book displays the scope of Voegelin's erudition
and the brilliance of his analysis, both of which are extraordinary and at
times overwhelming. Indeed, it is hardly an exaggeration to characterize
Voegelin as an overwhelming author. To be read critically and with profit,
his sources must be studied-a forbidding task to be sure, but one which
cannot be avoided. It is with one such source in mind, namely Plato, that
I pose a question or offer an observation.

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Voegelin contends that philosophy is a search for order; that the source
of order is the divine ground; that man possesses the faculty for communicating with or participating in the divine; and that the divine initiates,
as if by the gift of grace, the commerce between itself and man. The
Christian underpinnings of this thesis seem obvious enough, but in making
the argument Voegelin relies just as heavily on the Platonic dialogues,
among which he singles out for special consideration the Symposium.
The Symposium would seem to lend clear support to an existentialist understanding of philosophy, for it locates philosophy in the experience of love.
Voegelin recounts the Symposium's myth of the birth of Eros in which this
demi-god is said to have been generated of Penia (Poverty) and Poros
(Resource) ; and he describes the mythic event as " the sad-loving quest
of penury for fullness, and the inebriated penetration of richness into
poverty " (Hl8) . The human condition at its best, i. e., the life of the
philosopher, is one in which man, aware of his deficiency, seeks completion
in God; and in which God, ripe with love, draws man up into himself. This
experienced tension between the human and the divine-in the Symposium
called love-is apparently understood by Plato to be an indispensable component of philosophy.
But a second look at the Symposium raises questions. First there is the
myth itself. The myth teaches that love is the appropriate response to
recognized deficiency; but in no way can love explain the behavior of
Penia towards Poros, for their son Eros is as yet unborn. When Penia
is made aware of her deficiency, this "resourceless"
one does not
swoon with love; rather she devises (epiboule1wusa) a scheme for begetting
Ero8--'-sober calculation is her reaction. A tentative conclusion is that the
non-erotic but deficient Penia points the way to a non-erotic philosophy,
and that this philosophy is dialectics (the parched sobriety of separating
and combining, i. e., dialectics, is not unlike Penia's sober frame of mind) .
Further, the difference between the erotic and the dialectical response lies
in the preoccupation of the former with possessing the good in perpetuity
(i. e., personal immortality) and in the concern of the latter with defining
what the good is (this connection between dialectics and definition-giving,
manifest in Plato but neglected by Voegelin, invites, it would seem, some
rehabilitation of metaphysics).
A second point confirms the implication of the first that there is
something besides the erotic response to deficiency. When listing the
followers of wisdom or the philosophers, Socrates identifies Eros, but he
makes plain that Eros is only one among several types who abide within
the In-Between. If then there are others of this intermediate sort, they
must be negatively defined as non-erotic philosophers.
Thirdly, the daimonic In-Between, a state of being central to Voegelin's
conception of philosophy, suffers depreciation in the course of Socrates's

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speech. The first occupant of the In-Between is Eros, a demi-god; but
soon the boundaries of the In-Between are extended to include philosophers, then human beings generally, who desire the vicarious immortality
of offspring, and finally all procreative animal life. Rather than something
rarified and special, the daimonic state comes to designate ordinary
activity and the entire panoply of living things.
(I do acknowledge,
however, that comprehensiveness, from a different perspective, may reflect
favorably upon the daimonic and not constitute a depreciation) .
As the speech of Socrates progTesses, the daimonic In-Between regains
some of its original markings of spiritual excellence; and Eros is singled
out as man's guide in the ascent to the Beatific Vision. But it is
also stated that the initiation into love-matters is incomplete-other things
need to be said which are not being said. And Socrates admits in
conclusion that Eros is the best guide that human nature can easily
(radios) find. The same point is made in the Phaedrus, where love of
beauty is credited with being- the easiest form of recollection and where
true rhetoric, itself an expression of love, is thought impossible without
the governing assistance of non-erotic, dialectical knowledge.
With this example from Plato in mind, I state my reservation concerning Voegelin as follows: Plato seems to regard the erotic experience as
one means of ascent, likely the most common means, but not as simply
identifiable with philosophy; Voegelin seems to count them as one and the
same-which perhaps explains why in reading Voegelin it is difficult to keep
fixed the boundary between religious belief and philosophical inquiry.
p ATRICK COBY
Kenyon College
Gambier, Ohio

Existence and Existents. By EMMANUEL J.,F,VINAS. Translated by Alphonso
Lingis. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1978. Pp. 101.
Existence and Existents, begun before the war and published in 1947
in France, is a difficult book to evaluate in 1978. Evaluating and understanding it are all the more difficult for English-speaking readers who are
hearing of the book for the first time and who may not realize precisely
how it fits into the development of Levinas's thought and that of contemporary European philosophy. It is very important to note-and
one could have hoped to see this noted in the translator's introductionthat Existence and Existents in no way occupies a decisive nor a definitive
position in the larger development of European thought, and that it made

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no pretention to occupy such a position. Indeed, in the original preface
Levinas had called it a preparatory work, and admitted that due to
historical circumstances his study did not and could not take into account
the work of Sartre. But not only is this book not a major or influential
text in post-war French philosophy, it cannot even be seen as a definitive
book in the context of Levinas's own thought, for every analysis presented
in it has been integrally rethought by the author in his subsequent publications.
For those who regard the history of philosophy atomistically, and for
whom a book is a book and a text is a text regardless of the place it
occupies in relation to an author's entire work, Existence and Existents
can possibly appear to be a work of exceptional perceptiveness and descriptive skill, but for others of us who are concerned with the comprehension
and comprehensibility of Levinas's phuosophy, a presentation of this book
must not omit some comments about its relation to Totality and Infinity
and Autrement qu'etre ou au-dela de ['essence. To present Existence
and Existents as Levinas's mature thoug·ht is to impoverish Levinas's
thought; this book is not on an equal footing with the works that succeed
it. We should realize the value of the book and the significance of its
being translated in relation to Levinas's philosophy taken as a whole, and
thus in terms of the development of this philosophy. In the space that we
can permit ourselves at present we will try to throw some light on the
relationship between certain themes in Existence and Existents and Levinas's
more recent work.
Inasmuch as it is a preparatory study which finds a fuller development
in Totality and Infinity, one could expect Existence and Existents to offer
easier access to Levinas's later work, and to a certain degree it does.
However, one can also notice its nearly total irrelevance to Levinas's latest
work, which qualifies this preparatory character somewhat. But this
is understandable when we consider how it is preparatory to Levinas's own
philosophical position as much as to any particular works. Existence and
Existents is Levinas taking a critical stand at once in relation to Husserlian
Phenomenology and to its own greatest critic, Heidegger.
In 1930, after studies with Husserl in Fribourg, Levinas had already
expressed certain differences with transcendental Phenomenology; these,
developed in The Theory of Intuition in Husserl's Phenomenology, were, in
the end, based on the role that representation plays and the primacy of the
theoretical in constitutive consciousness and, as he says in Existence and
Existents, the doctrine of a neutralized and disincarnate intentionality.
Levinas's position vis-a-vis Husserl remains, in Existence and Existent11,
consistent with that of his earlier critique, and until recently his position
has thus remained unambiguous. To be sure, the return to Husserlian texts
which characterizes Levinas's most recent work is in no way a sign that

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this original criticism is now invalid, but it does modify and perhaps smooth
over to a certain degree the opposition between himself and Husserl.
But this book also represents the possibility of an alternative non.:.
Husserlian Phenomenology to that of Heidegger. The philosophy of Heidegger has long been a source of inspiration as well as of sorrow for Levinas,
and his expressed " profound need to leave the climate of that philosophy "
(p. 19) must be appreciated in terms of the historico-political situation in
Europe in the 1940's and of the relation between Heideggerian thought and
German nationalism (for Levinas's understanding of Heidegger cf., among
numerous other texts, " Le regard du poete " in Sur M attrice Blanchot,
Fata Morgana, Montpellier, 1975). A critical dialogue with Heidegger
concerning some of the most fundamental questions of contemporary
Philosophy is inaugurated with the publication of Existence and Existents,
and is pursued throughout Levinas's career.
Thus this little preparatory study represents a sort of inception of
Levinas's own philosophical position, offering basic lines along which
ulterior analyses will run and sketching out some of the fundamental
projects of this position. We have here elementary, if not downright
vague, references to what Levinas will later call "events", whose details
cannot in fact be discerned from this book alone, but which are recognizable
for the reader who knows the Levinas of thirty-one years later. The
difficulty of the text consists precisely in this state of affairs whereby a
preparatory study, by which one would be tempted to characterize the
Levinas project, contains just as much the beginnings of that which later
becomes more and more developed, nuanced and important, as the beginnings of that which later is discarded, surmounted or totally transformed
and which, today at any rate, appears naive and immature.

* * * * * * * *
That point in Levinas's thought which has remained of constant central
importance since Existence and Existents and which constitutes the particular characteristic of his philosophy is the role of the other. By reading
Existence and Existents we have the opportunity to observe the origins
of this importance in his thought; at the same time we can appreciate a
certain modification in its meaning since 1947. Levinas's essay concerns
itself with such topics as the present, fatigue, effort, the light and time, but
these analyses are aimed at an appreciation (which, as we have said, is
neither Husserlian nor Heideggerian) of the status of the subject, its
relation to its own existence, to the world and to the other. In fact, the
other is introduced to account for the very possibility and reality of
time. Levinas shows how the effort by which a subject poses itself
on a base confines it-by this effort and the fatigue that accompanies itto itself, i. e., confines it to the present, to reference to itself.

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In Levinas's view the act of taking position is the origin of subjectivity.
The body is the advent of consciousness, he tells us on page 71, for
intentionality and consciousness are not, as Husserl would have it, disincarnate, but localized. This localization of consciousness is the fact,
already understood by Descartes, that thought is a substance inasmuch
as it has a point of departure. For Levinas this point of departure is
a " here " defined by corporality, which means that the localization of
consciousness cannot be reabsorbed into consciousness, or into knowing, and
that consciousness rests upon something that it cannot account for. This
non-contemporaneity of consciousness with its conditions remains a
concern of Levinas's throughout his career, and receives different kinds of
treatment at different periods. In Totality and Infinity it is the relation of
the Same to the element, its autochthonous existence and the intentionality
of enjoyment; in Autrement qu'etre, on the other hand, it is the diachronic
relation with the Other in proximity, which, constitutive of identity itself,
prevents consciousness from ever absorbing its conditions into a single
homogeneous and synchronic time.
In Existence and Existents this localization of consciousness is antiHeideggerian; the subjectivity of the subject who " is in a certain sense a
substance" (page 81) is considered to be originally non-transcendent, i.e.,
non-ecstatic. The relation with the other in this essay is that by which
the subject-who poses itself as localized, who finds itself chained to itself
in the present, and who has no time to the degree that it is solitary-has
access to the transcendent, to time, and eventually, for Levinas, to the
possibility of hope and of salvation.
One will notice that this idea of time departs as much from that of
Heidegger as from that of the tradition. Here Levinas sees the other as
that which consciousness, the subject, is not, and which alone is capable
of forcing it out of its egoism, its self-reference, its present. The relation
between the subject and the other is time; time is no longer seen as the
relation of a solitary subject to a world that changes before it, nor as the
internal relation of a subject to its existence. It is instead seen as the
very fact of sociality, the very fact of intersubjective and interpersonal
reality. (In this early work Levinas describes the relation with the other
in terms of Eros, and calls the feminine "the other par excellence". Let
us say that in his later work Levinas treats of Eros further but ceases to
characterize alterity strictly as femininity, although his treatment of
the feminine deserves a certain amount of prudent attention) .
The role of the other in time is representative of another of Levinas's
critiques of traditional and Husserlian Philosophy concerning the status
of the subject. In Existence and Existents he only hints at the central
issue to be developed in Totality and Infinity concerning the Same
and the Other, and only refers obliquely to the totalizing and totalitarian

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aspect of the traditional view of the subject. But when he analyzes the
light (pp. 46-51, 84i-85), his analysis brings out the fact that Husserlian
consciousness is essentially Sinngebung, sense-bestowing, and con(lequently
solitary: "Illuminated by light, they [objects, the world] have meaning,
and thus are as though they came from me", says Levinas (p. 85).
But this solitude of consciousness is seen as inevitable, as a
result of its localized existence, its having a world and its having a place in
it. Only the other-as another person--breaks with this rule and opens
solipsistic consciousness to a true exteriority. This then is the egoistic
subject, the Same, of Totality and Infinity, and the relationship described
in Totality and Infinity between the Same and the Other is a development
of the earlier position. But the situation changes with subsequent publications, so that today we cannot even call Totality and Infinity Levinas's
definitive position. In Autrement qit'etre, the Other does not come later,
after a kind of egoistic self-identification in solitude realized in the
phenomena of dwelling and possession; in Autrement qu'etre the Same is
seen as the late-comer, as already infiltrated with the presence of the Other,
already undone in its projects to be one, unique and solitary, already
shot through with otherness. The ethical tone of Existence and Existents
and of Totality and Infinity is based on the relation between an originally
egoistic subject who is necessarily put into question by the arrival and
presence of the exteriority of the Other in discourse. But in Autrement
qu'etre the Same never "has the time" to constitute itself as unique, as
one; to be a subject is already to be " the other in me." The ethical
orientation of Autrement qu'etre is in no wise a "you should ... ", but
a " you cannot possibly not ... "; ultimately responsibility is seen as the
base upon which thematizing and solitary consciousness becomes a possibility, and indeed, a necessity.
Levinas himself sees the notion of the " there is " as the " morceau <le
resistance " of Existence and Existents, according to the preface to the
newly-released second edition of the French text. But also he wishes to
qualify the conclusions of the analyses of the " there is " as having
probably decided prematurely about the possible meanings to be associated
with this notion. The neutrality of Being without beings, which he calls
the " there is " and which is suspended and inverted by the taking position
of the hypostasis, has remained a relevant theme throughout the development of his thought, and especially in relation to Heidegger. However,
he points out today that the re-neutralization represented by the hypostasis
does not have its properly human meaning in a world of allergic
egoisms and indifference, but in a world animated by the non-indifference
of the proximity of the other. This is as much as to say that his thought
has undergone a very definite development which it is dangerous to ignore
when one reads Existence and Existents; in finding discrepancies and con-

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tradictions between Existence and Existents and Totality wnd Infinity or
even between the two and Autrement qu'etre, one must not imagine that
these are incoherencies in a single and unique thought. They are rather the
movement between one philosophical investigation and another. As Levinas
himself says, the project that Existence and Existents gives as its own,
to examine the Good, time, and the relation with the other remains the
project of his thought even if the terminology has been largely modified, the
earlier positions on the question left behind, and the basic concepts and
formula totally transformed. The change of approach between the investigation where the hypostasis is seen as the de-neutralization of the "there
is " which constitutes the subject, and that where the de-neutralization of
the egoistic hypostasis is the non-indifference of proximity (when to be a
subject is to be the other in me), is the chang·e that has slowly occurred
in Levinas's thought from the time of Existence and Existents to the
present.
Perhaps the analysis in Existence and Existents which finds the
clearest echo in the later writings of Levinas is that of fatigue and effort.
The relation between fatigue and effort, which he sees as constituting the
present in which the subject has an identity, is an early development of
Levinas's idea that the subject is constituted in passivity and is not
originally an active and acting subject. The analysis is elementary in
comparison to the description in Autrement qu'etre, begun in Totality and
Infinity, of enjoyment and suffering because of the explicit absence in
Existence and Existents of the other in this affecting as compared to the
absolute importance of the other in Autrement qu'etre at this stage. But
it remains for the most part instructive, even if the very meaning of
" passivity " has changed and even if the position of Existence and
Existents is unquestionably no longer one Levinas would identify with his
own.
So we must be grateful for the appearance of this text in English, but
we must also express the hope that it will in no way be taken to represent
Levinas's own philosophical position. We must hope that it will serve
as a stepping-stone to the study of a different phenomenological thought,
the thought of the "other than being." We must hope also that Levinas
will not be considered simply another writer in the postwar French Phenomenological movement, because he is a serious and innovative thinker whose
critical position vis-a-vis Phenomenology represents a very far-reaching
re-vitalization of this philosophy. The differences between Levinas and
Phenomenology are only beginning to appear in Existence and Existentsone must enter seriously into his later and latest works to see how he merits
the title of" anti-phenomenologist." For Phenomenologists in America, the
translation of Levinas's works can be of great value because of his ability
to remain in a certain and undeniable sense a phenomenologist while carv-

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ing out a new dimension and a new meaning for philosophy as a whole,
neither dwelling in the shadows of Husserl and Heidegger, nor " simply "
taking a nihilistic stand vis-a-vis Philosophy.
If we turn our attention now to the translation itself, there are
several comments that must be made. In this book of 101 pages, I have
counted twenty-eight errors, mostly typographical, of varying degrees -of
seriousness, although there are some that truly obscure the meaning of the
text and render it unintelligible. More specifically I would point out
the very unfortunate use of the English verb " to rive " in its past
participle form " riven " to translate the French verb " river " on page
58. In all other instances " river " has been correctly rendered by " to
rivet", but "riven" instead of "riveted" in this case means "rended"
or " torn apart " when it should mean the direct opposite. I would also
draw attention to page 29 which, apart from three typographical errors,
reveals a very vague use of " it " to refer to two different words: " indolence" (" elle ", la paresse) and "beginning" ("le", object pronoun for
le commencement).
By convention "it" refers to "indolence", but
suddenly refers to " beginning " because of sentence structure, and the
sentence comes out confused: "Beginning does not solicit it as an
occasion for rebirth ... : it (indolence) has already brought it (beginning)
about beforehand ... " This use of "it" for both "elle " and "le " is
of course not a mistake, but renders a difficult text extremely vague.
I have also observed, on pages 53, 57 and 80, traces of American habits
of speech which are somewhat more colloquial than such a translation should
be, not that the American reader would misunderstand, though a nonAmerican reader might well be surprised if not confused: " ... this way
[in which] a quality can divest itself ... " (page 53); " ... in the very fact
[that] there is something ... " (page 57); ''. .. thought would risk falling
into nothingness if God, ... , would withdraw [withdrew, or were to withdraw] from it" (page 80).
One must also wonder why the formula "moi-toi " has been rendered
by "I-you" (page 95) and not by "I-thou". Certainly our word "you "
now means both "tu" and "vous ", but the distinction between the
"tu" and the "vous" is fundamental in Totality and Infinity, for which
Existence and Existents is preparatory in this respect; furthermore, the
translation of Totality and Infinity correctly gives I-thou for je-tu. I see
no reason why this approach should have been abandoned for the translation
of Existence and Existents.
Perhaps this attention paid to grammar and other errors will appear
excessive to the reader of the review; still, the reviewer found himself
taxed by the abundance of errors in reading the translation and feels that
he should alert a public which will not have the French text available to
check ambiguities.

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In conclusion let us thank the translator, Alphonso Lingis, for his
work in making Levinas available in English-Totality and Infinity in 1969
and Autrement qu'etre and several articles in the near future. I can
only be pleased to see Levinas acquiring a potentially larger audience, with
the reservation already so often expressed regarding this particular work,
that I hope this younger Levinas will not be misconstrued as being the
philosophical equal of the Levinas of today.
CRAIG R. v ASEY
39 Blvd. de Reuilly
Paris, France

The Coherence of Theism. By RICHARD SWINBURNE. Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1977. Pp. 302.
Swinburne's The Coherence of Theism is a valuable and very welcome
contribution to the philosophy of religion. In the course of this century,
philosophers of religion have made or received attacks not only on the
truth but also on the coherence of theism, charging that there is a logical
incompatibility, for example, between two or more of the attributes traditionally assigned to God or between a state of affairs in the world (the
existence of evil) and the existence of God. The object of Swinburne's
book is to demonstrate that, whether theism is true or false, it is not
incoherent. The book is remarkable for the lucidity, patience, and philosophical ability of its author. He does not eschew broad, controversial issues
outside the specific range of philosophy of religion, such as the objectivity
of morality or the nature of necessity, when they are relevant to his
argument; and though he cannot deal exhaustively with these issues within
the scope of this book, he discusses them with such philosophical sophistication and clarity that philosophers concerned more with one of these
issues than with the philosophy of religion may very well be interested in
the book.
The rigor and the subject of the book may in fact repel or annoy readers
whose devotion to theism or to a less formal style of philosophical theology
makes them feel that the investigations of the book are needless or worse.
Swinburne's introductory remarks to such readers are moving and cogent:
" Religion [such a reader may think] is not a matter of affirming creeds, but
of a personal relationship to God iu Christ .... [But] even if affirming creeds were
no part of religion, you can only have a personal relationship to God in Christ,
if it is true that God exists. And it is true that God exists only if it is coherent
to suppose that he exists. . .. [Furthermore,] even if the religious man has no need
to question the truth, let alone the coherence, of his beliefs and of the claim that
he has a personal relationship to God, he has, at any rate on the Christian view,

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BOOK REVIEWS

a duty to convert others. If they are to believe, those others need to have explained to them what the theist's claims mean. They often doubt the coherence
of these claims. If the religious man could show the claims to be cohe1·ent,
he would remove a stumbling block in the way of the conversion of the unbelievers .
. . . Some religious men may [also] feel that a book such as this gets too subtle
and difficult. . .. [But] it is one of the intellectual tragedies of our age that when
philosophy in English-speaking countries has developed high standards of argument
and clear th:Uking, the style of theological writing has been largely influenced by
the continental philosophy of Existentialism, which, despite its considerable other
merits, has been distinguished by a very loose and sloppy style of argument. If
argument has a place in theology, large-scale theology needs clear and rigorous
argument.
That point was very well grasped by Thomas Aquinas and Duns
Scotus, by Berkeley, Butler, and Paley. It is high time for theology to return to
their standards " (pp. 6-7) .

The book begins with an investigation of the conditions necessary for a
sentence's expressing a coherent statement. The discussion then turns to the
analogical use of terms in theological language, as understood by some
medieval and post-medieval theologians, and Part I concludes with an
examination of the claim that the sentences that make up creeds do no
more than express attitudes or commend ways of life. Part II investigates
in detail the coherence of the various claims which constitute basic theistic
belief: that there exists a non-embodied omnipresent person who is free,
creator of the universe, omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good. It
includes sections on the compatibility of omniscience and free will and on
the objectivity of morality. Part III discusses the nature of necessity and
the coherence of the claim that God is a necessary being, who of necessity
has the attributes he has. Swinburne's conclusion is that theistic belief is
demonstrably coherent if God is taken to be a contingent being, some
of whose attributes (such as omniscience) are weaker than they are
traditionally taken to be among theists but that belief in a necessary God
can be shown to be coherent only to the extent to which it can be shown
to be true, an issue which falls outside the scope of his book.
As one would expect in a work of this scope, not all the chapters are
of equal quality. Swinburne explains that, since he cannot cover all the
issues in as much detail as he would like, he will refer the reader in the
footnotes to work containing more thorough discussions of the issues he
treats (p. 5) . But in many places, there is not enough in the footnotes to
fill in the gaps in Swinburne's treatment of a subject, especially in his
section on the objectivity of morals. Both his case against subjectivity in
morality and his case for objectivity are weak, and the references in the
footnotes are remarkably few. The reader will, for example, find a much
better argument against what Swinburne calls subjectivity in morality in
David Lyons's article, "Ethical Relativism and the Problem of Incoherence "

BOOK REVIEWS

475

(Ethics 86 (1975), 107-rnl), which Swinburne does not cite in his footnotes.
It seems to me also surprising that in this section Swinburne says nothing
about the problem of evil, since a number of philosophers have claimed that
the existence of evil in the world makes belief in God incoherent (see, for
example, H. J. McCloskey, "God and Evil," Philosophical, Quarterly 10
(1960).
In general, I am not convinced by Swinburne's attack on what might
be called the non-human attributes traditionally ascribed to God, such as
necessity, immutability, or omniscience (understood in a strong sense so
that God knows future free human actions). The section on God's timeless'ness is particularly weak. He takes the doctrine that God is eternal
to mean basically just that God is timeless, though in the standard medieval
discussions of this attribute (by Boethius and Thomas Aquinas, for
example) there is a great deal more to God's eternality than timelessness.
He gives a brief and, I think, inadequate account of the concept of God's
eternality in the Old and New Testaments and among theologians, suggesting against most medieval Christian philosophers that the concept is
not an integral or fundamental part of Christianity. In fact, belief in
God's eternality is to be rejected, according to him, on two different sorts
of grounds. First of all, he finds the concept incoherent. He gives two
arguments for this view, neither one of which I think will hold up under
scrutiny. For the sake of brevity, I will consider just the first argument
here:
" God's timelessness is said to consist in his existing at all moments of human
time-simultaneously.
Thus he is said to be simultaneously present at ... what
I did yesterday, what I am doing today, and what I will do tomorrow. But if
t 1 is simultaneous with t 2 and t 2 with t 3 , then t 1 is simultaneous with t 3 • So if the
instant at which God knows these things were simultaneous with both yesterday,
today, and tomorrow, then these days would be simultaneous with each other ...
which is clearly nonsense." (pp.

The initial premiss of this argument is difficult to assess since Swinburne
does not ascribe the view in question to any particular authors, but it
is a definition of God's eternality (or even just of his timelessness) which,
for instance, Boethius or Thomas Aquinas would surely reject. Even
if it were acceptable, however, the rest of the argument is not. In the
first place, God cannot be said to know anything at an instant, if he is
timeless. And secondly, if the general principle about simultaneity on
which this argument depends holds, it seems to do so because ' simultaneous ' is being understood to mean ' at the same time as.' In that sense
of ' simultaneous ', it is plain that God considered as timeless is not
simultaneous with anything, and some event's being present to God does
not entail its being simultaneous with God (so that the argument's initial

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BOOK REVIEWS

premiss and the antecedent in the conclusion of the argument are both
false). If there is some sense of 'simultaneous' in which God and a
temporal thing can be said to be simultaneous, then ' simultaneous ' is being
used in a sense different from ' at the same time as ', and that sense needs
to be spelled out. But even with such a new sense of ' simultaneous ', it is
doubtful whether Swinburne can formulate a true general principle of
simultaneity which would give him the conclusion he wants. From the
view that a is timelessly simultaneous with b and with c, it seems plainly
invalid to infer that b and c are temporally simultaneous with one another;
but this is the sort of principle Swinburne needs to validate his conclusion
that if God is simultaneous with yesterday and tomorrow, then those days
are simultaneous with each other.
Swinburne rejects the concept of God's eternity also because he views
it as an altogether unnecessary and therefore dispensable part of Christian
doctrine. He thinks that the concept plays no useful role except perhaps
to reconcile human free will with divine omniscience taken in the strong
sense (to include foreknowledge of free future actions), another divine
attribute which he considers dispensable. But here he is just mistaken.
The notion of God's eternity plays an influential role in a wide number
of issues in the philosophy of religion. For example, it enables theologians
to reconcile God's perfect goodness with the Scriptural notion of predestin-ation, God's immutability with the practice and efficiency of petitionary
prayer, and God's omniscience with his immutability. One of the reasons
Swinburne may not notice or accept the usefulness of the concept of
eternity for reconciling God's omniscience and immutability is that he
rejects Kretzmann's argument (in" Omniscience and Immutability", Journal
of Philosophy 63 (1966), that these attributes are incompatible if God
is temporal. But here too I think Swinburne's position is not acceptable.
Kretzmann claims that there are some propositions which are knowable
only at certain times and not at others; therefore an omniscient being must
change with respect to his knowledge and hence cannot be immutable.
Swinburne rejects Kretzmann's argument because he thinks the initial
claim is false. To attack that claim, Swinburne relies on this principle
formulated by Castaneda ("Omniscience and Indexical Reference", Journal
of Philosophy 64 (1967)):
[P] " If a sentence of the form ' [a person] x knows that a person y knows
that ... ' formulates a true statement, the person x knows the statement formulated by the clause filling the blank' .. .'," (p. 165).

To use one of the examples Swinburne gives, if John knows that Mary
knows that George is ill, then John knows that George is ill. Swinburne
applies this principle to Kretzmann's argument in the following way.
Kretzmann bases his claim on propositions involving' now'. For example,
on 9t October, 1978, A knows ' It is now 9t October, 1978 '; on previous and

BOOK REVIEWS

477

subsequent days he cannot know this proposition because it is false. But,
Swinburne counters, "B on 3 October can know that A knew what he did
on 2 October. How can B report his knowledge? By words such as 'I
know that A knew yesterday that it was then 2 October.' How can we
report B's knowledge? As follows: B knew on 3 October that on the
previous day A knew that it was then 2 October." (p. 165) It is important
to see that the two formulations of B's knowledge, as Swinburne presents
them, are different in a respect significant for the issue under discussion.
B's formulation of his knowledge still contains an implicit reference to what
time it is now: [1] 'I know that [a] A knew yesterday ... '. This formulation in no way detracts from Kretzmann's argument but rather
supports it. What B claims to know in [1] is something that he can know
only at a certain time, namely, on 3 October, 1978. Consequently. if God's
knowledge of what A knows is explained according to the formulation in
[1], then his knowledge must change because on 4 October, he will not
know [a] (since [a] will no longer be true) but rather [a1 'A knew the day
before yeste1·day. .. ' . On the other hand, consider what Swinburne says
about our knowledge of B's knowledge: we know that [2] B knew on 3
October that (b] on the previous day A knew that it was then 2 October.
If we understand God's omniscient knowledge as represented by B's knowledge again, then this second formulation, like the first, is no evidence
against Kretzmann's claim but confirmation of it. If however, God's
knowledge of what A knows is meant to be assimilated not to B's knowledge
but to our knowledge (of B's knowledge) in this formulation, then I think
Kretzmann would be right to claim that though God's immutability is
preserved by this formulation, his omniscience is impugned because on
this understanding of God's knowledge there is no longer any reference
to what time it is now. When A knows that it is now 2 October, 1978, he
knows not only (i) the appropriate dating label for a certain day but also
(ii) where in the unfolding of history th'Lt day is (namely, at the present).
If God's knowledge amounts only to this, that on 3 October, 1978, B knew
that on the previous day A knew that it was then 2 October, 1978, then
God's knowledge includes (i) but not (ii) .
And so it is not true that on (2] God knows what A knows. Swinburne's attack on Kretzmann's argument, then, fails. (I have argued
against Swinburne's use of Castaneda's attack rather than against CaSitafieda's attack itself, but I think that Castaneda's work is vulnerable to
analogous criticisms). Successfully to reject Kretzmann's argument that
God is either omniscient or immutable (with respect to knowledge) but not
both, one must make use of the concept of eternity, which implies that
God's knowledge is not temporally locatable.
Though there are, then, some weak sections in Swinburne's book, they
are not sufficient to detract seriously from its overall excellence. The

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BOOK REVIEWS

carefulness and comprehensiveness of this book, brought to bear on so
fundamental an issue, make it an outstanding contribution to the field.
ELEONORE

STUMP

Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State UniVersity
Blacksburg, Virginia

The Religious Thought of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. By DAVID PYM. New
York: Barnes & Noble, 1979. Pp. 105. $14.50.
As John Coulson states in his brief foreword, one always welcomes
another book on Coleridge's thought or influence, even one as slim as this
(84 pages of text plus notes!) . And indeed, Pym is to be commended on
his work of synthesis in what every Coleridge scholar knows to be a
morass of manuscripts and teeming fragments of a seemingly undefined
whole. He has offered a short introductory chapter on Coleridge's basic
interest in theology and successive chapters on Coleridge's notion of God,
In a
Christ, the historical Jesus, and the Scriptures and Interpretation.
small space, he provides an overview of Coleridge's entire project as a
religious thinker. During the course of this outline, there are helpful
glances and capsule comments on the 19th century theologians and thinkers
who followed Coleridge's path in the Broad Church.
Yet the book is sadly lacking. Its general view of Coleridge the theologian
remains bound by the customary canards of pre-contemporary criticism.
While aware that Coleridge intended a systematic whole and that he
occasionally believed he had accomplished it, Pym denies its authenticity as
project. He argues that Coleridge's thought is of one weave (if not of
the same materials), and yet ignores the influences his aesthetics of
symbol had on his interpretation of religious language. These two major
strictures make Pym's general interpretation less than useful since their
neglect forces him into dichotomies which Coleridge preferred to resolve.
Pym must leave Coleridge between the 18th and 20th centuries without
even a symbolic lifeboat to save his own appearances.
So Pym stresses a division between inner spiritual development (Coleridge's religion) and outer socio-political events (Coleridge's lack of
interest); between reason (Coleridge's universal and somewhat wrongheaded
metaphysics) and history (particular illustrations).
This reviewer would
maintain that Coleridge was more than aware of these contraries, and
that he did attempt to resolve them in his notions of perception, epistemology, and interpretation and metaphysics of symbol. Yet without these
mediations Coleridge must appear as either a flawed Platonist, curiously
tempted by the historical fact of Christianity, or a foggy Aristotelian
hoping that evidence will not disprove principles.

BOOK REVIEWS

479

Pym's solution to this issue has become a common one in Coleridge
studies: to make him an existentialist avant la lettre. Coleridge's personal
suffering forced him to place his person as the reference-point for the
reality of things. The importance of miracles, Bible, external history,
etc., is their existential import to the believer. That is what the word
' true ' means to Coleridge. If one dismisses Coleridge's claims to a
system and prefers to ignore his arguments for a metaphysics of subjectivity
which would include empirical history, then 'existential import' may
be one's only recourse to justify continued interest in Coleridge's thought.
Without the mediation of affection as an apprehension of value, it will
be impossible to discern how Coleridge has struggled to overcome the
conflict of Duty and Interest; without the arguments of Coleridge in his
Essays on Method, MSS. Logic, or the notions of imagination available from
the Bristol Lectures (1795) on, it will be impossible to explain 'how' for
Coleridge the spirit works upon the letter in biblical inspiration. And
Coleridge's Christology will seem ' idealized ' if one does not include his
notations to Scriptural commentaries and their emphasis on the humanity
of the Logos. The problem is not so much that Pym does not provide an
overview as that without recognizing the difficulty of the questions
Coleridge asked or the methodological complexity of his answers, overview becomes oversight. A comprehensive and systematic book on Coleridge's religious thought remains a requirement.
STEPHEN HAPPEL

St. Meinrad School of Theology
St. Meinrad, Indiana

BOOKS RECEIVED
University of California Press: Truth, Love and Immortality: An Introduction to McTaggart's Philosophy by Peter T. Geach. Pp. 176;
$14.95.

University College Cardiff Press: God and the Secular: A Philosophical
Assessment of Secular Reasoning from Bacon to Kant by Robert
Attfield. Pp. !!15; lb. 9.50.
Columbia University Press: Visions of the End: Apocalyptic Traditions in
t1u: Middle Ages by Bernard McGinn. Pp. 363; $!M.OO.
William B. Eerdmans: Christian Faith: An Introduction to the Study of the
Faith by Hendrikus Berkhof. Pp. 541; $20.95.
Fides/Claretian: Western Spirituality: Historical Roots, Ecumenical Routes
edited by Matthew Fox, 0. P. Pp. 435; $9.95.
Greenwood Press: The New Image of the Person: Theory and Practice of
Clinical Philosophy by Peter Koestenbaum, Pp. 536; $19.95.
Harvester Press: Renaissance Man and Creative Thinking: A History of
Concepts of Harmony, 1400-1700 by D. Koenigsberger. Pp. 282;
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Walter de Gruyter: Science of Religion: Studies in Methodology, edited by
Lauro Honko. Pp. 576; D. M. 96.00.
Paulist Press: The Dialogue of St. Catherine of Siena, translated with an
Introduction by Suzanne Neffke, 0. P. Pp. 366; $7.95 paper.
Ridgeview Publishing Company: Falsification and Belief by A. McKinnon.
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Seabury Press: Karl Rahner: An Introduction to His Theology by KarlHeinz Weger. Pp. 200: $10.95. Creativity and God: A Challenge to
Process Theology by Robert C. Neville. Pp. 163; $12.95. Cliffs of
Fall: Paradox and Polyvalence in the Parables of Jesus by John D.
Crossan. Pp. 118; $9.95.
Surhkamp Verlag: Die Erklaren: Vestehen-Kontroverse in TranszendentalPragmatischer Sicht by Karl-Otto Apel. Pp. 355; D. M. 30.00.
Templegate: The Way of the Preacher by Simon Tugwell, 0. P. Pp. 194;
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University of Tennessee Press: Humanism and the Physician by Edmund
D. Pellegrino. Pp. 242; no price given.
University Press of America: Ideas of Religion: A Prolegomenon to the
Philosophy of Religion by John E. Sullivan, 0. P. Pp. 234; $9.25.
Linguistic Ramifications of the Essence-Existence Debate by Germain
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Vintage Press: The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor, edited
with an Introduction by Sally Fitzgerald. Pp. 596; $8.50.
Yale University Press: Aristotle's Theory of the Will by Anthony Kenny.
Pp. 171; $17.50.
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